Peer-led learning
Your role
As a teacher your role is to facilitate all activities, ensure time and appropriate resources are available for the group and assist in any administration procedures. The worksheet activities will need your guidance and provide a way of assisting students to set up their groups, focus on an area of study, plan for their project, review their work and undertake self and peer assessment.
Getting started
The process uses a peer-led, peer-assessed model which enables young people to take responsibility for their own learning. Here we unpack this process in an easily accessible way for both students and teachers. The eight steps we included in the process are:
1. Group contract
2. Deciding on an issue
3. Building the team and planning the work
4. Researching the issue
5. Interim review
6. Presenting the findings
7. Review, learning outcomes and assessment
8. Accreditation
These may provide a useful guide but are not prescriptive and can be used flexibly or to inspire your own ideas.
1 Group contract
The first stage of the process is intended to help young people decide and agree how they will work together. Here, you are aiming to:
- empower the young people to create a group contract agreeing how they will work together
- begin the process of building trust and communication within the team.
Planning the contract
- Ask the group to sit in a circle.
- Ask them to think of an example of a contract, for example with employers, football teams, working with builders etc.
- Ask what their understanding of a contract is.
(A contract can be easily explained as a set of rules to control the way two or more individuals interact with each other. It is a useful tool, which can be referred to during group reviews. It is also useful in situations where conflict resolution may be necessary).
- Ask the group to think of ideas about rules, guidelines or principles which would help everyone work together.
- Pupils should discuss the implications of the rules they suggest and everyone should agree before they are written down.
- At the end, ask everyone to sign the bottom of the contract to show their commitment.
The group contract worksheet can be used to record the above information.
The facilitator may wish to steer the group towards discussing areas such as:
- taking part
- support
- listening
- respect for others, equipment and environment
- punctuality.
A ‘noise-o-meter’ created by the facilitator could be used to remind the students of the type of noise levels appropriate to certain activities. This can be displayed on the wall for students to see.
2 Deciding on an issue
Here are some thoughts about how best to support the class or group to choose an issue to explore.
Kicking it off
This can often be the most challenging stage of the project. Faced with a blank canvas. pupils can find it difficult to immediately identify issues of concern or interest. This is an area which may need to be flagged up with the young people prior to deciding on the topic, giving them time to reflect on issues they encounter through the media, at school or in the community. On the other hand the process may be embarked upon as a democratic way of responding to a particular school or curricular issue which needs further exploration.
Time and support
The key to this stage is ensuring that young people have the right amount of time, support and stimulation to identify and bring to the table issues of real concern. It’s important that activities used allow all voices to be heard and sensitive issues to be raised. This stage sets the tone for the whole project. It is the best opportunity for the young people to take ownership of the process. Time given at this point has been found to be time well spent.
Useful strategies and resources
There are lots of resources available to stimulate participation, discussion and debate, such as Participation - Spice it Up (Dynamix and Save the Children 2002). ‘Think, pair, share’, ‘Post-its’ and ‘Paper carousel’ are extremely useful activities to generate ideas. For details of these, and other strategies to encourage participation, look at our Participation and Learning resource.
Making choices
A class could agree to look at different topics per group, or everyone might agree to explore different aspects of the same issue. Once the young people have come up with a range of possible topics, there are lots of different ways of narrowing down the choice or voting for the most popular. ‘Dot voting’ is a very inclusive way of doing this - more details of this can be found in the Listening, consulting and feedback section of our Participation and Learning resource.
3 Building the team and planning the work
Working in their chosen group of approximately four, the students need to:
- develop and agree on a plan and timeline to explore their topic
- negotiate and agree responsibilities within the group by looking at their present skills and those they each wish to develop
- propose how they will share or present their findings with others at the end of the process - though ideas may evolve during the research phase.
The following documents could be useful in planning and keeping track of the project:
Word file: Making decisions worksheet (42 KB)