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Thriving in Academe
Best Practices
The Keys to Successful PLTL
 A
few key ingredients all but guarantee a good peer-led team learning
experience:
Good problems. Textbook
presentations are often dry and rarely engage students. Good problems
connect important course concepts to real-world applications that truly
interest students. Learning is more concrete, a real boon for the vast
majority of our students.
Good peer leaders. We
look for motivated and responsible students who relate well to their
peers. Then we recruit them as peer leaders. We support peer leaders
with “pre-service” workshops and provide ongoing support.
Good communication. Three-way
communication among instructors, peer leaders, and students is key.
At Brookdale, peer leaders are part of the teaching team. We meet regularly,
both in person and online. Through extensive journaling, peer leaders
let instructors know how problem sessions are going and where students
are having trouble. As a result, instructors can fine tune instruction
midstream.
Because peer leaders are students, too, they
help open communication lines between the instructor and students.
Because of this open communication, from week to week, instructors
know what students concerns and learning difficulties are and can respond
accordingly.
And the problem-solving sessions help students
to help each other. Sometimes that’s the magic bullet for a struggling
student.
Our plan was successful due in large part to
a series of two-way, open communication links and processes that include
cycles of asking questions about what we have learned about the teaching-learning
process, harvesting answers to those questions, publishing the results,
asking for responses to the results, and publishing those responses.
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