When Your Student Is Your Colleague

Martha A. Davis (Temple University)
and Lyndy Danvers (Temple University)

Many universities have "Experiential Learning," programs which place students in businesses and agencies in the community to hone their skills in a practical setting. Recently Temple has begun an internal placement in which students put into practice the methods and materials they are being taught in the course of their undergraduate education.. This program, the Diamond Peer Teacher Program, provides a stipend to support undergraduate students chosen to work with  faculty members in  semester-long courses. A faculty member mentors a peer teacher in a variety of activities, from presentation of subject matter to tutoring class members, to preparation of classes and assessment of student achievement.

In Spring 2006 we, a faculty member of the Department of Greek & Roman Classics and a peer teacher and major in Classics, team taught the beginning Latin class. The peer teacher’s presence enabled the faculty member to use more active learning techniques in the classroom than is possible in a regular context. While the peer teacher learned pedagogy, the students enrolled in Latin 51 gained an opportunity to learn through speaking and listening as well as reading and writing, and access to assistance provided by a peer as well as by a professor. Midterm- and end-of-term-evaluations indicated that students of Latin enjoyed having a team taught class and reacted well to being taught by a peer.

On this panel we will report on the positive and negative results of faculty-undergraduate peer teacher interaction, with details of some successful activities used in the classroom.