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I am interested in creating a curriculum that helps cultivate students abilities to teach one another. Specifically good one-on-one instruction includes elements like:

Examples, Pictures, Humor, Socratic Questioning, Challenges appropriate to the students abilities. One could even evaluate an instructor (and a potentially a student-instructor) on their ability incorporate these elements into their teaching.

We might ask students to teach one another certain skills like how to add fractions with different denominators and most teachers have a sense of who would be good at teaching and who might be a tad patronizing or dismissive but I haven't ever seen a curriculum which directly addresses and develops instruction abilities in students.

My questions:

1) Does such a curriculum already exist?

2) What research is out there on having students teach one another in one-on-one contexts?

3) How does this community feel about students teaching one another directly?

Mason
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    Students know very little. Perhaps this makes sense in a subject with less content, but, Mathematics requires skill and being taught something to get correct answers from wrong reasoning is a real danger with student-led teaching. In short, I believe the fact that teachers are educated allows them to be educators. To me, the idea of centering instruction around students teaching one another sounds like a gimmic... – James S. Cook Jun 18 '18 at 19:38
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    To me, teaching ideally requires two things: knowing your content deeply, knowing your audience. Students might have the latter but they certainly don't have the former. I assume your question is about teaching a math class where focus on content is pretty much required. A fact that too many non-math people radically fail to appreciate. – James S. Cook Jun 18 '18 at 19:38
  • I am just making up contexts now: But presuming that students have the content knowledge does this remain a unsavory idea? Say, we're pulling $n$th graders into a $n-2$th grade classroom. I think $5$th graders can teach how to draw fractions to $3$rd graders and $8$th graders should be able to teach solving linear equations to $6$th graders. – Mason Jun 18 '18 at 19:45
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    Seems similar to: Is Peer Instruction suited to mathematics classroom? – Benjamin Dickman Jun 19 '18 at 03:00
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    At what level? And peers or non-peers? The answer for one 12-year-old teaching another is probably not the same as for a graduate student teaching an undergraduate student. – Peter Taylor Jun 20 '18 at 16:38
  • @PeterTaylor My question is intentionally non specific on that front.

    If we started training children in how to teach one another... we had a class called Math, English, Social Studies and Socratic Teaching... Socratic Teaching class is where they learnt to be better teachers to others.

    When would you think we should start teaching that course? Maybe middle schools? Maybe earlier?

     – Mason Jun 20 '18 at 17:18

1 Answers1

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There are two related concepts which go by similar names:

(1) Peer Teaching: "a method by which one student instructs another student in material on which the first is an expert and the second is a novice." See this opencolleges link.

(2) Peer Instruction: Eric Mazur's flipped classroom technique.

Peer teaching is one model for using students to teach students and circumvent TheChef's problem that "Students know very little."

This source may help:

The Definition Of Peer Teaching: A Sampling Of Existing Research.

Joseph O'Rourke
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  • FWIW: Peer Instruction was asked about, in particular, back in MSE 643. – Benjamin Dickman Jun 19 '18 at 03:01
  • @BenjaminDickman. I appreciate it. I am not sure if you're suggesting we should just close my question as a duplicate. That's not the worst result but also I could try and distinguish this question as a call for curriculum resources. – Mason Jun 20 '18 at 17:21
  • @Mason: I don't think that's what Benjamin meant. After all, Peer Instruction is actually not that close to your model. Peer Teaching is a closer fit. – Joseph O'Rourke Jun 20 '18 at 18:50