There are different strategies of study applied by different educational institutes nowadays. Teachers try to use different methods to engage the students in learning better and do not feel bored during the study. Greater educational institutes such as Invictus School Combodia which take better learning of the students as their first priority use the most powerful strategy for better learning which is peer learning as this strategy has proven to extend student’s level of interest in the study and ultimately the students understand things better.

What is peer learning?

Peer Learning is a teaching and learning method in which a group of students collaborates to solve a problem, complete an assignment, or produce a product. Each team member is responsible for not only learning what is learned but also for assisting team members in learning, resulting in an environment of accomplishment. Students work on the task before everybody in the group understands and completes it.

Peer learning is often used in classrooms to provide a welcoming learning experience for students and to encourage customized learning. It has been shown to be one of the most popular school-based training approaches.

Why should we use peer learning?

Peer learning methods, according to research helps to:

•  promote student learning and academic success
• Accomplishment.
• Retention of students should be improved.
• Improve student happiness with their education
• It was a good learning experience.
• Assist students in honing their oral communication skills.
• the exchange of information
• Students’ social skills should be developed.
• Encourage students to feel good for themselves.
• Assist in the promotion of healthy race ties.

How to prepare for peer learning?

Many students have been exposed to and are used to conventional educational methods.

A good Peer Learning (PL) lesson requires careful planning and scheduling. The PL lesson’s performance is essentially determined by two factors:

1. Establishing and maintaining well-functioning communities
2. The types of challenges that the students would overcome.

For the first element, PL classes are organized and controlled to ensure that all students in the community participate actively and appropriately.

The challenges must foster higher order logic and logical reasoning in the second factor. Problems that aren’t just plugged into a formula.

How does peer learning work?

Simply placing students in groups and asking them to collaborate does not suggest that they understand how to do so. Working cooperatively entails much more than just being in the same room as other students. According to Johnson et al (1990), a cooperative lesson must contain five components. The following are the five elements:

1. Good interdependence.
2. face-to-face promotional engagement,
3. individual responsibility
4. coping skills, 
5.  group processing.

Peer learning and individual learning

The structure of group responsibility is to measure the group’s average success and then provide the results back to the participants to compare against a standard of excellence. Person transparency can be structured in a variety of ways such as:

• Keeping the squad to a manageable size.

• Give each student an individual exam.
• Specific oral exams should be given at random.
• Examine each party and its members.
• Assign the position of checker of comprehension to one student in each party.
• Students should be asked to teach what they’ve learned to someone else.

• Allow members of the community to edit each other’s work.
• Challenge students to apply what they’ve studied to a new challenge.

Implementing peer learning in a classroom

Individual responsibility should be structured in the classroom by making the class study together but giving individual assessments, randomly testing the learning of individual student members, or adding the task of checker to each group. Members of the community support one another’s learning by assisting, communicating, and supporting one another’s attempts to learn.