Education Peer Tutoring BOOSTS IQ!
Education Week posted a phenomenal article this month which points to the many benefits of Peer Tutoring, which is simply students helping students learn. The article entitled “Peer Tutoring’s Potential to Boost IQ Intrigues Educators”, list the arguments for and against.
If you have already read “Set Our Teachers FREE! A Plan to Save Public Education” by Don Kingsland then you know that Don is an advocate of peer teaching/tutoring and has used it successfully since 1963. Utilizing peer studying, along with his compassionate teaching skills, Don was able to help thousands of students achieve previously unimagined levels of academic success.
The study referred to in the article was published in June by two Norwegian scholars and dealt primarily with sibling peer teaching, but the article goes on to quote experts about the evidence of benefits in school, as well. We read
“Of all the theories . . .one is particularly relevant for educators. It suggests that firstborns are smarter because they spend more time tutoring younger siblings.”
“Explaining something to a younger sibling solidifies your knowledge and allows you to grow more extensively.”
While there are skeptics and naysayers, I personally feel their arguments are spurious and/or shortsighted. One scholar, who shall remain nameless, was quoted as saying,
“How much tutoring do siblings do, really? I still think it’s a bit dubious.”
OBVIOUSLY, this gentleman has never observed family life close-up among brothers and sisters.
We also heard an activist parent complaining that she sends her daughter to school “to be taught, not to do the teacher’s job”. Again, we feel this is short-sighted. It is also an uninformed and mean-spirited statement, in my not-so- humble opinion. Why would ANY parent object to programs that increase benefits to their children? Again, OBVIOUSLY, it is due to a lack of valid information.
The article continues with an explanation of the research that states thirty years of studies have suggested that elementary-level peer-tutoring programs demonstrate:
“Both the tutor and the tutee learn better when they teach each other than they do in regular teacher-led classrooms. Some studies have even shown the effects for peer teachers are greater than they are for the learner. . .”
Stephanie Rhoton, a 4th grade teacher at Dodson Elementary School in Hermitage, Tennessee is quoted as saying:
“Both high- and low-skilled students profit by working together. With the higher-IQ children, they know the material and they understand the concept, but they have a hard time verbalizing it. When they work with their peers, it challenges them to have to explain it. I can’t quite explain it to them the way their peers can.”
I would like to conclude this post with three examples in my own life that make me a dedicated advocate of peer teaching.
- I was the oldest child growing up. Over time, I became a walking dictionary and encyclopedia for my younger siblings, who always came to me FIRST, when they needed assistance. I’m convinced that this is one reason I became a straight “A” student myself.
- During my high school years, I attended a private school, highly ranked for it’s academic excellence. (Although our football team sucked!)
In my sophomore year, I attended a Geometry class instructed by a brilliant mathematician. Unfortunately, she had a difficult time expressing the subject in a manner that my classmates could grasp. She was just too smart for them to understand.
After an initial struggle, when she seemed to think I was trying to take over her class, we developed into a very effective team. She would explain the lesson to me during classtime, then I would stand and explain the concept to the rest of the class in extremely simple terms so they could understand, then we would move on to the next concept.
It was a WIN-WIN-WIN situation. I got VERY good at geometry, my classmates all did VERY well in geometry, and the teacher gained some SIMPLE explanations for teaching future classes.
- Finally, although the article emphasizes the benefits of peer teaching with younger students, I experienced the benefits to adult learners firsthand.
In nursing school, I got straight “A”s again, but I had to work slavishly to maintain that.
In my final semester, I joined a student peer teaching group that had been functioning since Freshman year. Since I lived so far away from school, I had never been a part of the group before.
Once I joined the group, the shared experience made graduating first in my class SO MUCH EASIER.
What can you do to help our public schools?
- Join the “Straighten-Out Public Schools NOW!” Club.
- Read “Set Our Teachers FREE!”.
- Visitwww.thekingslandplan.com and learn about the COMPLETE PLAN to restore excellence to our schools.
We must stop falling behind. We need every parent, teacher and taxpayer in America to learn about The Kingsland Plan and start DEMANDING changes in our public schools!
Brennan
