Two articles in this issue explore students learning from and with each other—one deals with peer feedback on writing and the other with the relationship between peer learning experiences and psychological well-being. Both contribute to the now voluminous literature on how and why students can and should learn from their peers.
Despite the evidence, many faculty still worry about peer learning. They may use it, but often without confidence and with a lot of concerns. Here’s a list of some of the main objections and some possible answers to them.
What students learn from other students won’t be correct
That’s a possibility. Students don’t have the teacher’s expertise. They don’t know the content as well as the teacher. But the teacher is there overseeing the process, and can’t mistakes be corrected and learned from?
What students learn from other students will be superficial, oversimplified, and watered down
That description fits a lot of first learning. It marks the place where we start understanding. What students have going for them is the ability to communicate with each other. They can explain things in ways that make sense to them. No, they don’t usually offer sophisticated teacher-like explanations, but often when those complex explanations are what students hear first, they don’t always lead to learning.
What do students know about teaching?
Probably not much. But neither do parents, Sunday school teachers, or college professors when they first start teaching. Student teachers have the advantage of recent memories of how they came to understand the content. They know how they figured out the problem. They know what examples helped them understand. They know how they answered the question. They have recent learning experiences from which to draw. And, like us, when they teach, their learning benefits.
Interpersonal dysfunction will compromise the learning
All sorts of bad things can happen when students work together. They can individually and/or collectively decide to not take the task seriously. They will do it, but just barely. They can have disagreements, not be able to resolve them, and reach a point where they can no longer work together productively. However, group dysfunction isn’t inevitable. Simple instruction in how to work together can help to prevent problems, and students can be empowered to address the issues related to how they’re working together. They can learn how to work together productively, if we teach them.
What’s learned from others can’t substitute for the learning work that needs to be done alone
No, the group can’t learn it for the individual, but others can support individual efforts. A group can motivate the work that needs to be done individually. True enough, nobody can learn something for somebody else. Learning is an individual act, but learning can and does happen in the presence of others and with their support.
Grades measure individual mastery of material
When students are working on projects together, it’s much less clear how much each individual knows, but not all student-to-student collaboration needs to be graded. Cooperative learning advocates argue against grading group work. The purpose of the collaboration in cooperative learning groups is support of individual learning efforts. Group work can also be designed so that parts of the project are the responsibility of individuals. Those parts can then be assessed in terms of individual knowledge.
Some students don’t think they can learn with others
We learn from others throughout our lives. Mostly, students who want to work alone are responding to poor previous experiences—study groups that wasted time and didn’t review with intensity. If study groups are a course requirement, then teachers must design them so that robust interaction is necessary. We live in cultures where most professional work involves working with others. The agenda in our courses isn’t to make students like working with others. The goal is to provide experiences through which they can learn the skills of collaboration.
It’s an abrogation of the teacher’s responsibility
Students don’t pay money to learn from other students. They pay money to learn from the teacher. Right. The goal of peer learning isn’t to replace the teacher. But in addition to content expertise, teachers also knows how to facilitate learning—to create conditions that are conducive to learning, to design assignments and activities that promote learning. Teachers are learning experts. They know that not all learning happens in class or involves them teaching.
