So what is Peer Instruction? It’s a flipped classroom where information is not transerred from the tutor to the student. But information is assimilated in the classroom by active participation by students and teachers.

How Does it work?

• Tutor asks question based on students’ responses to their pre-class reading
• Students reflect on the question, submit their answer and the tutor reviews their responses
• Students discuss their logic in group of 3/4 with a time constraint
• Students submit their own answer again
• Tutor again reviews responses, decides whether more explanation is needed before moving on
• And the cycle continues one concept at a time

Who created it? Professor Eric Mazur, consistently received high student evaluations and peer reviews for his introductory physics course at Harvard University. The epiphany came in when his students failed a simple test designed by David Hestenes. The test checked a student’s understanding about the concept pf ‘Force’ at its most fundamental level. And to Mazur’s surprise his students faile! He quotes “they could recite Newton’s Third Law and apply it to numerical problems, but when asked about a real-world event like a collision between a heavy truck and a light car, many firmly declared that the heavy truck exerts a larger force. (Actually, an object’s weight is irrelevant to the force exerted.)After a semester of physics, they still held the same misconceptions as they had at the beginning of the term.”

And thus began Mazur’s two decade long journey of transforming how we teach.

Does it work? Claims?

• triples students’ gains in knowledge as measured by the standard conceptual tests!
• erasing the gender gap between male and female undergraduates! (Mazur speculates that the verbal and collaborative/collegial nature of peer interactions may enhance the learning environment for women students)
• Better retention of knowledge. Students who learn through this pedagogical apprach actively argue, defend and explain their understanding of any concept and hence retains the knowledge longer!
• Improvement in Social Skills!
• Cultivates more scientists. Those taught interactively are only half as likely to change to a non-STEM discipline as students in traditional courses!

Where did I come across this? and do I believe in it? you ask! I was a part of operations team at an education startup in India called Avanti Learning Centres. It is a social enterprise, focused on providing quality education at an affordable rate. It was during this I was exposed to the concept of Peer Instruction. I taught Physics and Chemistry for a year to high school students following this pedagogy. Not only did my students learn, a lot of my concepts got clear. (After teaching Laws of motion , I solved a question from Irodov!!) So Yes, I’m a firm believer in Peer instruction based learning over traditional information transfer structure of lectures.

Want to know the full story and verify the claims!? Visit: https://harvardmagazine.com/2012/03/twilight-of-the-lecture

Want to know about Avanti Learning Centres and our results: https://avanti.in/about/

Reference:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer_instruction
• https://harvardmagazine.com/2012/03/twilight-of-the-lecture

The easiest way to make your first post is to edit this one. Go into /_posts/ and update the Hello World markdown file. For more instructions head over to the Jekyll Now repository on GitHub.