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Thriving in Academe
Peer-Led Team Learning
An Active Learning
Strategy That Works
By Thomas Berke, Brookdale Community College
Looking for a non-threatening way
to introduce colleagues to the power of discovery learning? PLTL may
be the answer.
What is the best way to learn? At Brookdale
Community College we are exploring a method as old as humankind—teamwork.
Cave dwellers must have worked together to plan the hunt, and the Egyptians
must have had committees to plan construction of their pyramids. In today’s
world, collaborative work seems to be the way organizations function
best. The team or group is the engine that gets things done. Why not
apply this method to the process of learning?
Brookdale’s Peer-Led Team Learning
(PLTL) program incorporates the best elements of active teamwork by offering
weekly workshops in which student groups, led by trained peers, work
on solving problems selected from topics we cover in weekly lectures.
The problems we use take students from the concrete to the abstract,
and working in teams gives students a chance to develop the communication
skills they’ll need in the future.
In its first year, PLTL had a major impact
on our students— no class failures or incompletes, higher exam
grades, enhanced communication and teamwork, and improvement in critical
thinking and problem solving.
 Meet
Thomas Berke
Tom Berke is professor of chemistry at Brookdale Community College. From his
first day on campus in 1970, Tom has been involved with curriculum issues,
including pioneering efforts in educational computing. He became the college’s
first coordinator of educational computer services. He is responsible for his
department’s move into PLTL, the department’s first step toward
collaborative discovery learning. Tom also introduced computers into the lab
for data acquisition and data analysis. He is currently developing a discovery
learning environment for an organic chemistry course using a quantum mechanical
package to allow students to actively investigate classroom concepts through
guided explorations. He can be reached at tberke@brookdale.cc.nj.us.
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