Describes an approach for motivating at-risk students to use available peer-tutoring services. Reports that students feel more comfortable about the peer-tutoring service when tutors (rather than the teacher) give brief in-class presentations in which they describe the services offered. (RS)

The Regular Education Teacher Consultant program was initiated to provide a support system to general education teachers who are teaching mainstreamed special needs students. Regular education teachers were selected as peer consultants and received training on behavioral principles, positive teaching techniques, observation codes, academic…

Boyd et al.'s survey of 309 4-H Club members indicates participation is positively related to leadership life skill development. Groff's evaluation of 4-H Teens Reaching Youth found this peer helper program developed leadership skills in teen volunteers who taught younger youth. (SK)

Proposes combining peer-response exercises from Peter Elbow and Pat Belanoff's book "Sharing and Responding" with the series of written peer critiques in Kenneth Bruffee's "A Short Course in Writing." Argues that these types of peer criticism work best in tandem in the collaborative classroom, capturing the struggle between individual expression…

Discusses collaboration in the peer writing center. Suggests that applying hierarchical and dialogic collaboration to writing centers can help to sketch out the forms of collaboration in peer tutoring, but a more fine-grained rhetorical analysis will result in richer and more precise descriptions and avoid hardbound categories and stereotypes. (RS)

Offers a narrative based on a real event, in the form of a "docustory," describing that moment when teaching worked--when, in an instructional setting, communication was "perfect,""best," or "excellent." Describes how, in a one-room country school where "buddy assignments" were common, a second-grade boy helped a third grader to finally understand…

Used elderly educator method for increasing rate of return of fecal occult blood sampling in colorectal screening among 171 socioeconomically disadvantaged older persons. Two methods using elderly educators had overall response rate of more than 60%. Found statistically significant difference between two methods that used elderly educators and two…

Discusses three weaknesses of using cooperative learning, including making students' responsible for each other's learning; intentionally structuring groups with students of mixed abilities, thereby creating child-teachers who must explain the same material over and over; and encouraging fact-based learning rather than thinking. (CR)

Focused, sustained staff development occurs too seldom in U.S. schools. The "just-in-time" approach involves learning teams composed of teachers who teach a specific content area at the same time or at contiguous grade levels. "Bite-sized" training sessions, facilitated by a staff-development professional, occur every few…

Provides an approach to ensure that courses are implemented as designed. Highlights include training the trainers and peer teaching, the need for cooperation between the course development and delivery teams, the use of technology, using subject matter experts, and evaluation through telephone interviews that supports this approach. (LRW)

Presents a method to make precalculus college freshmen accountable to the class for doing at least some of their assigned homework problems by making each student an expert on one or more of the assignments. (ASK)

Comparison of instructional versus non-instructional roles on the interactions of general education high school students and their peers with disabilities found that during the non-instructional role condition, students engaged in more social-related than activity-related interactions, discussed a greater variety of conversational topics, and…

Project InSights trained elderly volunteers to conduct peer education programs on vision health. A majority of 55 volunteers felt they provided an important service and made a useful contribution. A majority of 560 participants in the vision education learned something new and about half intended behavior changes related to vision. (Contains 19…

As the Pokemon game craze illustrates, the combination of peer education and technology makes for powerful educational experiences. Educators need to accept technology-based peer education as a help rather than a hindrance to improve educational outcomes for students. (SLD)

Studied the efficacy of Peer-Assisted Learning Strategies for First-Grade Readers (PALS-1) with children of varying reading ability and the impact of adding 8 to 10 hours of phonological awareness instruction by computer to the PALS-1 curriculum for low-achieving students. Results for 183 first graders show that PALS-1 enhanced reading ability,…