The power of peer educators to help your students practice
We worked hard to become experts in our fields. We faculty work hard to plan and teach our classes. And now a pandemic has us working hard to continue and refine the shift to remote teaching. As professionals in teaching within higher education during trying times, we can leverage the Learning Commons’ peer educators to facilitate students’ practicing what we teach. Here’s both why we should make the benefits of trained peers helping peers visible to students and how we can best connect them with the Learning Commons’ highly trained peer staff.
The value of practice
Durable learning requires practice. In Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning, Peter Brown, Henry Roediger, and Mark McDaniel explain how the practice of mentally retrieving information supports durable learning. Deliberate practice involves effort, failure, and renewed attempts; it is necessary for acquiring, understanding, and applying new knowledge. Varying and spacing out practice also support learning, recall, and the ability to discriminate between different problems and techniques for solving them.
The Learning Commons offers opportunities for practicing a variety of tasks and content associated with classes that most faculty teach. Our trained peer educators tutor math, natural sciences, languages, and a variety of business, economics, and nursing courses. Our peer-assisted learning (PAL) facilitators offer weekly collaborative learning sessions for specific courses in math, nursing, and physics. For faculty who teach courses that require written papers and oral presentations, our Writing Center and the Speech and Presentation Lab provide opportunities to practice writing and presenting. We also support students who want to develop more effective study strategies. Many faculty use group projects to support learning. The Group Work Lab offers students the opportunity to practice how to work well in a group to enhance learning and performance.
As students connect with our trained peer educators, they enter a relationship that involves practice with content, problem solving, and the written and oral communication of new knowledge. Our peer staff have been trained in deploying processes that involve initial assessment of student needs and abilities, the demonstration of strategies, and ample time to practice that is capped off with summative assessment and planning for success in both learning and presenting new material and big ideas. Students also experience and identify with a more knowledgeable peer who can listen and respond to their needs.
When you leverage the Learning Commons to support student learning in your courses, you are also supporting yourself as a teaching faculty. Students who practice the material you teach will be better prepared to process actively the learning that you are working hard to facilitate. They will be more likely to retrieve concepts and problem solving approaches and with greater accuracy. Initial data from our PAL facilitation program reveals that students who participate in weekly PAL collaborative learning sessions are more likely to receive A and B grades and less likely to receive C and D grades or withdraw.
Attitudinally, students will likely be more confident and motivated to learn in your class, if they utilize our trained tutors and PAL facilitators. Our surveys of students using Learning Commons’ programs show that overwhelming majorities feel more confident with the tutored material (between 93% and 95% depending on the program) and more motivated to continue learning it (between 84% and 92%). Between 84 and 86% of respondents attribute improvements in course grades to their work with our peer educators. Based on our Writing Center surveys, 98% of respondents report feeling more confident with the writing assignment, 95% report feeling more confident with writing in general due to their work with writing assistants, and 91% report feeling more motivated to complete the assignment.
How you can support students practicing what you teach
A class culture develops in every course we teach, and we faculty can weave practicing with the Learning Commons’ peer educators into that culture. Means of doing so include:
- Normalizing practice of the taught material and the use of peer educators as facilitators of learning and practice by promoting the Learning Commons and its programs that are relevant to your course;
- Including a link to the Learning Commons on your Moodle page and with all or specific assignments;
- Adding links to our Bookings Scheduler and our Writing Center Scheduler to your assignments, your Moodle page, or in your Zoom chat window during synchronous online sessions.
- Inviting to your class a writing assistant or tutor who can explain how easy it is to connect with our peer educators. Use our visit request form to invite one of our peer staff to visit your class virtually;
- Verbally encouraging students to use the Learning Commons. You can do this during class, when working with breakout groups, or during office hours;
- Actively directing students to the Learning Commons’ information that is available in the most current syllabus statement.
There are many ways to connect your students to the Learning Commons’ peer educators. Most importantly, explaining how deliberate practice supports learning (and grades) along with your repeated encouragement and endorsement of continued practice with our trained writing assistants, tutors, PAL facilitators, and peer consultants will go a long way toward helping students reach higher levels of performance, confidence, and motivation. Now, as we are still in the early weeks of a new semester, is a good time to start encouraging practice as a learning strategy and the use of the Learning Commons as a place where trained peers can support your students’ deliberate practice of the material you teach.
Jeffrey White directs the Learning Commons at UP, where he collaborates with others to supervise and support over 60 tutors, writing assistants, and PAL facilitators. He also teaches courses in the Department of International Languages and Cultures. Currently, Jeffrey is the immediate past president of the Northwest College Reading and Learning Association.
Many critics of “bad PowerPoint” note that tools can be used well or poorly. An excellent slide deck isn’t the presentation; it supports the presentation. The most effective use of technology happens when our tools fade into the background. The irony, of course, is that creating the conditions in which technology disappears requires careful forethought and a relatively sophisticated understanding of said technology’s capabilities to support one’s work. So, before assigning a discussion forum for its own sake, or out of habit, take a step back and consider the instructional goals you wish to achieve. Do you want students to reflect on a specific aspect of coursework, to research and answer a specific question, or to share progress and critique their peers’ work? Is a forum the best tool to support this goal? If so, there are several different flavors of forums available that can help address your specific teaching needs, important settings that can be tweaked to expedite a suitable learning environment, and some best practices to consider as a facilitator.
The Standard Forum for General Use is the most versatile and is a good fit for most discussion activities. It allows students to start their own discussion threads and reply to others, which is appropriate for forum activity structures in which students are asked to add their post as well as reply to peers. It provides the greatest potential for learner agency; students have space to “own” the threads that they start. They can express themselves via the choices they make when titling their threads and structuring their prose. Further, they can choose to participate in and reply to threads from others that they find the most interesting or stimulating. Instructors can also easily add topics or reply directly to student threads in this format.
In any class, but particularly online, setting expectations and establishing clear lines of communication are important. Face-to-face, you might have an opportunity to set guidelines for your in-class discussions early on. In an online environment, you need to be proactive. You should clearly communicate details and expectations about writing voice, citation requirements, and timeliness expectations. Will you require an initial post to be submitted early in the week, or can all posts be made last minute? Write up (or record and post an audio or video message) detailing what you expect from students and “
You should consider early on how often and how heavily you plan on participating in the forum discussions. To some extent, this is up to faculty preference. Some instructors like to give specific feedback early and often or prompt for additional thinking, while others prefer to observe, letting the conversation develop naturally, and jump in only if the conversation needs to be steered back on track. There is some research-based evidence that supports the latter approach. One study found that “the more the instructors posted, the less frequently students posted and the shorter were the discussion threads”(Mazzolini & Maddison, 2007). That said, more is not the same as better; the authors caution us not to conflate volume with quality. Students in courses in which instructors were more active on the forums rated those faculty as more enthusiastic and displaying higher levels of subject-matter expertise on subsequent course evaluations. A second qualitative study notes that “students place a high value on individual responses from the instructor and a summary at the conclusion of the discussion topic” and that student engagement in online courses dropped when instructors did not post enough. (Reonieri, 2006) Clearly, there is value in faculty participation in discussion boards.
If forums are going to be an important part of your course and require a high degree of student engagement and work to be worthwhile, you probably agree that they should be graded. This raises both pedagogical and practical concerns. Are you going to treat forums as “participation” by giving full points for meeting basic requirements, or are you going to critically assess student work? Will students have a chance to revise and improve their work? Will you use a rubric? These are questions you should be comfortable answering. In any case, your feedback is critical for students to understand whether or not they are contributing to the course discussions satisfactorily.
What is too small or too large for a productive online discussion? Reonieri (2006) identifies a number of issues that can impede effective online discussion forums when class sizes are too small (too few perspectives, not enough interaction) or too big (too overwhelming, shallow and repeated comments, off-topic tangents, heavy instructor workload) and posits the optimum discussion group size to be a “medium” class of 10–15 students.
Moodle forums can send email notifications to any forums or discussions you or your students subscribe to. If you take the time to understand and set up these notifications, they can be incredibly helpful. When ill-understood or untamed, however, email notifications can be equally burdensome. Fewer things are more irritating than realizing you missed out on an important conversation because you simply didn’t know it has happened. At the same time, a deluge of email notifications is entirely overwhelming for today’s over-stimulated students (and, let’s be honest, instructors).
Every Fall, ATSI updates our Moodle instance to provide enhanced security and functionality. For faculty, it’s easy to miss finding out about new Moodle features or changes that can enrich student learning, or just create new efficiencies in your work. In this post, I want to roll-up and present the top new features available to you in Moodle for Fall 2017. Each link below leads to a short tech tip article and video walkthrough.
Presentations are a valuable learning activity – giving students the opportunity to practice speech and communication skills, to collaborate with others, and to develop digital, design, or storytelling literacies. However, when attempting to cycle through many individual or group presentations in limited class time, there can often be unneccesary stress and frustration as students take precious minutes with the need to login-in and out of various web services, search for and download files they’ve emailed to themselves, or even realize that they’ve left their flash drive at home and can’t access their files at all.