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6: ORGANISING PEER TUTORING

Section Contents:

A Brief Summary

Key issues involved in organising a peer tutor project include:

Remember the first project must be a resounding success - for the children, the tutors, the neighbourhood grapevine and (not least) for you. Start off small and invest time to ensure success for all.

Consider your context: any special strengths on which to capitalise, or any special difficulties to deal with? Consult with all relevant parties. Set clear and realistic objectives: intellectual, attitudinal, social or a combination of these. Do not try to solve all the worst problems with your first effort.

Decide on target pupils - both type (ages, classes, abilities) and number to be invited to participate. Involving parents is easier with younger children. Take care to avoid any stigmatisation of the project as "just for slow ones".

If using games, determine how many games of what Level you will need to have available for your expected participant group - make sure you have them in stock, categorised and labelled in time. Make very sure the instructions will be readable by the people who will need to use them. Consider where they can be accessibly stored. Keep a supply of spare dice, playing pieces, etc.

In peer projects, operation within one regular class is easiest to organise. Cross age is more difficult to organise, but can have additional benefits.

Match children into pairs. Usually aim for heterogeneous maths ability in the pairing, but aim for a modest ability differential rather than a big one. All participants should find some cognitive challenge in their joint activities and the tutor should be "learning by teaching". Certainly ensure that one partner is a capable reader of instructions. (However, for puzzles and extension games, same ability pairing can work well, provided complex instructions can be read).

Where the maths games are largely dependent on chance, the ability of one of the partners to read the instructions and to clarify the rules will be important. However, where the puzzles involve both chance and strategy, the choice of pairs will need to be more carefully teacher-directed, probably seeking partnerships including one child with greater mathematical insight. Pupils whose reading may not be fluent can sometimes intuitively solve problems by which their putatively more "capable" friends are baffled - with interesting effects on relative self-esteem.

Consider whether to match pairs within or across gender - and what the adverse effects of either might be. If undecided, go for across gender. Avoid matching children who are already good friends, as this can lead to much off-task behaviour. Expect initial squabbles in a few pairs - only re-pair after 2-3 weeks if all else fails. Consider how you will deal with non- attendance - some re-pairing might be necessitated then. Re-pairing for everyone much later to introduce novelty might be considered.

There needs to be a basic agreement between teacher, tutor and tutee to play maths games for a short period of time for several sessions per week over a period of six weeks.

Peer projects can operate in lesson time, or as part of support time or lunch-time Maths Clubs, or even in after school "Homework Centres" or "Supported Study Centres" (see Peer Assisted Learning: A Practical Guide for Teachers, Topping 2001a). A minimum core of Paired Maths in timetabled class time is always valuable, not least to ensure continuity and give the project credibility. In peer projects, pupil monitors can help distribute games and record cards, etc.

Remember, if using games, pairs must initially take any activity from a different area each week. The experience of most schools is that a six week project fits readily into half a term, so that there is no difficulty with the holiday breaks.

Establish a way of keeping games or activities together according to the conceptual area. Boxes with different coloured stickers for each area and a different number for each game within an area gives a helpful coding system. If using Duolog Maths, consider to what extent pairs can select problems of their own choosing, and what degree of guidance will be needed (perhaps especially with weaker mathematicians).

The child's choice of game or activity or problem needs to be recorded on record chart (see Games Record Chart in Reproducible Section of this manual). Once the project starts, most participants are happy to do the checking in and out themselves. However there will need to be someone available at "exchange time" to discuss choices, oversee returns, answer questions, listen to experiences and help solve any difficulties. When the game or activity or problem chosen has proved impossible to live with, some facility for "emergency" early exchange is helpful.

At the training meeting, talk to the whole group about the rationale of the project, especially about enjoyment, while emphasising the underlying mathematical or scientific concepts and relating these to the participants' own experience. Mathematics is not just computation: it is learning about relationships, patterns and shapes. Point out that not many people say they like maths, and tutors should not pass negative or defeatist attitudes on to their tutees. Everyone often actually competently uses a wide range of different types of mathematical activity in their everyday lives, however good they think they are at "school" maths.

A discussion of the games or problems, with a practical demonstration of at least one, is now needed, with clarification of the mathematical concepts and language involved. The day to day commitment and organisational arrangements involved in joining the project can now be detailed. Partners need to be told where the games will be kept, what days and times are scheduled for game exchange, who the key people are in school to ask for help and advice, and how to record which games have been borrowed.

Outline opportunities for access to on-going support and encouragement, especially at exchange time. Tutors may also need advice about playing games at different levels. Advise that missing or damaged games or pieces should always be reported (some wear and tear is inevitable and no blame will attach), since otherwise the next pair will receive an unplayable game.

Toward the end of the meeting, deal with any remaining questions. Ensure that all pairs have the how-to-do-it leaflets or flowcharts and any other materials they need. These can also serve as part of the "script" for a teacher conducting their first training meeting. Do not however give out materials too early in the meeting, as reading will interfere with listening. Partners should leave the meeting with a game or problem, diary/language card for games, explanatory leaflet or flowchart, details of exchange arrangements and the date of the follow up meeting.

During the course of the project, the co-ordinating teacher will directly observe, check diary/record cards and discuss with participants whenever possible to check that all is going well. The teacher can also stimulate discussion and ensure no false assumptions, personal friction, or other deviations develop.

The subsequent follow-up meeting enables exchange of feedback between tutors, teachers and tutees, leading to evaluation of the project and consideration of onward progression, possible improvements and further planning. Try to avoid domination of the meeting by the most vocal. Participants could be asked to complete a parent evaluation sheet (see Reproducibles section in this manual), which will help them to focus on some of the questions to be discussed.

Many pairs may wish the project to continue in some form, albeit less intensively. Each pair should feel able to make whatever choice seems right for them - and of course reserve the right to change their mind. If they wish to continue after the trial period, they have complete free choice across all game areas, and can pursue their own current enthusiasms.

The meeting needs to be a celebration of all the commitment and continuing involvement that has been shown. Certificates or badges for the participants can be a part of this. A pocket book of ideas for further maths games could be given as a "thank you" offering and stimulus to continue.

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More Detail On Planning And Implementation

This sub-section is divided into twelve sections which relate exactly to the sections of the Structured Planning Format which will be found in the Reproducibles section of this manual.

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A: The Context

All children are different, and schools are even more different from each other. All successful projects have certain common elements, but each must be designed to fit comfortably within the ecology of a particular school at a particular time in its development.

Problems

Careful consideration should be given to potential problems which are specific to your individual establishment. There may be difficulties with massive problems in a particular curriculum area in a particular age group, or with a large proportion of ethnic minority pupils struggling to learn the majority language, or with a high proportion of students with special needs.

Students might be completely unmotivated and have very low expectations of themselves, alienated from the aims of institutional education, and perhaps feeling incapable of playing the part of a helper. There might be an unusually high incidence of off-task and/or attention seeking behaviour, linked with a lack of student self-organisation and inappropriate or chaotic goal-setting.

The peer group may be divided into sub-groups, with poor relationships between them, and there may be a high incidence of behaviour problems in the classroom setting.

If you feel that standards in the school are, in general, lower than they should be, take especial care. The facilities, resources and curriculum in the school may be outdated or poorly organised or culturally inappropriate. It is very important that projects are not used to compensate for, and thereby perhaps disguise, fundamental weaknesses in the professional teaching or organisational infrastructure within a school. Schools that have failed to organise many things are unlikely to have any greater success in successfully organising this.

It is also important that teachers do not see in a peer tutor project a means of giving students extra practice under the supervision and control of the professional as an alternative to the more challenging development of involving the natural parents of the children at home. Natural parents acting as helpers at home have great strengths in this role, as well as weaknesses, which are different from those of either peer helpers or professional teachers.

However, if you are somewhat depressed to realise that you have all too many of the problems listed above, do not despair. This is not a fragile methodology which only works in ideal situations where there are no problems. It can be used to address some of these problems. Indeed, in some cases it takes what you thought was a problem and turns it into an opportunity. You do need to be sharply aware of the problems before you start, however, and be thinking about how to compensate for or otherwise handle these issues.

Support

Although it is possible to operate a project in isolation within the confines of your own classroom with helpers and helped from your own class group, some support from colleagues inside or outside the school is nevertheless highly desirable to maximise the chances of a successful first project. At the very least, the agreement of the school principal will be essential. If this is a new venture for the school, advice and support from colleagues in other, more experienced, local schools or specialist advisory agencies should be sought.

You may encounter four kinds of response from your professional colleagues towards your proposal. Some may feel that what you are intending is fundamentally wrong, and will go out of their way to express disapproval or be more tangibly obstructive. Others will be largely indifferent, but you may be grateful for the fact that they do not actually get in your way. The third kind of response is from those colleagues who express very positive attitudes towards your proposal, thinking it is 'a wonderful idea', and giving you much encouragement. This is all very well, and may make you feel good briefly, but you may find that these positive attitudes are not translated into practical help subsequently. The fourth and most valuable type of response comes from the colleague who is very interested and is prepared to offer you practical help, time and resources, perhaps as part of a learning exercise for themselves.

Throughout your planning, it will be most important that you are very clear about the delegation of any tasks relevant to your project. Where colleagues have agreed to undertake responsibility for specific aspects of organisation, this should constitute a cast-iron agreement. You are likely to find it useful to complete the Structured Planning Format and circulate copies of it to colleagues who are supporting you so that they are fully aware of the organisational structure of the project - and you may care to indicate their responsibilities with a highlighter.

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B: Objectives

You must be clear from the outset as to the objectives of the enterprise. A clear and focused sense of purpose will guide your onward planning, and help prevent you from becoming muddled or over-complicated, and from taking on too much work. Also, clear objectives give a framework for eventual evaluation of the project, and protect you from those who complain that it has not solved every single problem in the school.

Be clear about how your intentions align with the existing curriculum and existing instructional goals and objectives, whether they stem from your own thinking or are prescribed by the principal, your school district, your state or nationally. A project should not be a bolt-on appendage (risking looking like a transient whim or purely a search for novelty) - it should be integrated with your overall pedagogical aims for the year.

Are you aiming for gains in achievement ('academic' attainment or 'cognitive' gains)? Or 'meta-cognitive' gains, so that students show more insight into their own learning processes and thereby become better able to regulate and control them productively? Or motivational gains, so students try harder and appear to value learning more? Or attitudinal gains, in terms of improved attitudes to the curriculum area, or improved attitudes to each other, or improved attitudes towards themselves (in terms of gains in self-esteem and self-confidence and higher expectations)? Or social and behavioural gains, with students becoming more collaborative and less competitive, more on-task and in-seat, more able to work in teams, more able to give and receive praise, more nurturing and less hostile, more cohesive and less alienated?

Which of these are you targeting for the helped students? Which of these are you targeting for the students who are helpers?

Try to specify exactly what you hope to achieve. Try to conjure up a vision of how you wish the students to be doing things differently by the end of the project. Which students, in which curriculum area? What do you see? Write it down in observable, operational terms.

How might these changes be measured? If your objectives are framed only in very vague general terms (e.g. "improved classroom atmosphere"), how will you know if they have or have not been achieved? What exactly would you expect to see and hear which would be good evidence that the "classroom atmosphere" had indeed "improved"?

Different teachers will run peer helper projects for very different purposes, and a success for one teacher could be construed as a failure by another teacher with different objectives and expectations. Objectives do need to be realistic. Do not be over-ambitious, or you will just build in failure for yourself.

It might be reasonable to expect both helpers and helped to show increased competence in the curriculum area of the peer helping, and perhaps increased confidence and interest in that area. However, it is not reasonable to expect a brief project to make a major impact on a longstanding and widespread problem in the school. A degree of reasonable caution when setting objectives creates the possibility of being pleasantly surprised subsequently.

Also remember that your objectives might be quite different from the (unspoken) objectives of the students, at least at the start. They might just be seeking entertainment, in which case you had better make sure that your project is enjoyable for the students, until deeper and more intrinsic motivation kicks in. Sometimes students have quite bizarre ideas about what peer assisted learning might be, which can interfere in a troublesome way until they are unlearned, so take the time to explore their existing pre-conceptions and resistances with your students. Student acceptance and ownership is likely to be better if students perceive that this has been introduced for developmental rather than administrative purposes, and detailed feedback is not directly accessed by authority figures.

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C: Curriculum Area

In Problem-Solving with BP - Maths - of course! But much of this advice can also apply to peer assisted learning projects in other areas of the curriculum. For more detail, see Topping (2001a).

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D: Selection and Matching of Participants

Having considered what (curriculum area), we should consider who (will be helpers and helped). Basic structural factors should be considered first. Is a cross-institution or cross-building program desirable or feasible, or would the difficulties of synchronising time-tables and arranging and supervising transport or movement from place to place be just too much? If the helpers are older, mature, and reliable, the latter might not present too much difficulty - but particularly for a first project, you should try to minimise the things which can go wrong.

Even within the same building, peer tutoring between two different classes (whether of the same or different ages/grade levels) can present problems if the class rooms are far apart, or the route between them is complex or replete with other attractions. For a first experiment, peer tutoring within one class over which the innovating teacher has total control certainly has advantages - less to go wrong and no-one else to blame if something does (but see the caveat above).

Consideration is also needed of whether the peer tutoring will be class-wide on an equal opportunity basis, or whether it will be confined to a selected sub-group. Teachers who are somewhat anxious about launching into a class-wide approach might prefer to start with a selected sub-group, but this should be representative of the whole class rather than some elite.

However, you should take great care that you do not give signals that peer tutoring can only be done by particular types of student - especially not only by those students who are most like the teacher. Also be careful about signals regarding who it is done to, or stigmatisation will result. Additionally, it is as well to publicly rationalise starting with a sub-group as a trial or pilot, which will be extended to all students if it proves to be a success.

Class-wide peer tutoring is almost always compulsory for participants, although students typically do not notice its compulsory nature, accepting it naturally as another class activity. In the early stages of a small scale peer tutoring project, you might feel that asking for volunteers would ensure well motivated participants and maximise your chances of success. While this is true up to a point, you need to consider the nature of the group of volunteer helpers - if they are predominantly white middle-class females, the sociological implications and costs of deploying them with ethnic minority socio-economically disadvantaged males needs to be thought through. By sending out the wrong social signals, you might actually reduce the already limited inclination to participate of some students even further. You want peer tutoring to be seen as enjoyable, desirable and 'cool' by all your students before too long.

Background Factors

All teachers have experienced the great variations in general maturity levels shown by classes in succeeding years. It would be particularly unwise to mount a project involving many children where the maturity of the majority to cope with the procedure is in grave doubt. In cases of uncertainty it is usually wisest to start with a small pilot project, to enable further helpers to be added to the project subsequently as a 'privilege'. Where the children have already been used to taking a degree of responsibility for independently guiding their own learning and/or working on co-operative projects in small groups, they may be expected to take to peer tutoring more readily. You will need to consider these issues for both helpers and helped.

Having said that, peer tutoring can improve peer group relationships, serve to develop social cohesiveness, and improve work habits. Thus some teachers deliberately deploy it in situations where there is a widespread lack of sharing, co-operation and mutual understanding in a group of children. However, more ambitious operations of this sort are perhaps best left to the more experienced, who have already run successful projects with relatively amenable groups of children.

Age

Remember that an age differential between helpers and helped is probably of less significance in terms of effectiveness than an ability differential. Organisationally, however, students of the same age, grade or year are usually easier to bring together. If you intend to use helpers who are considerably older than the helped, unless you are fortunate enough to teach a vertically grouped or mixed-age class, you are likely to find the organisation of the project considerably more complicated, particularly if the helpers are to be 'imported' from another school. Any cross-age helping arrangement will usually create difficulties of matching timetables and movement of pupils.

Although you may find strong views among your colleagues and indeed the children themselves as to the acceptability of either same-age or cross-age peer tutoring, perhaps with strong preference being expressed for one, remember that overall the research suggests that both tend to be equally effective. However, there is some evidence that where the ability (and therefore often the age) of the helper is substantially greater than that of the helped, the helped student may be expected to benefit more, although this may be at the cost of the helper benefiting somewhat less.

Numbers of Participants

Figure out your target totals of helpers and helped. It is always as well to start with a small number of children in the first instance. Resist any temptation to include 'just one more', or before you know where you are the whole thing will become unmanageable. Particularly for a first venture, it is important to be able to monitor closely a small number of children, and do everything well.

Do not worry about those who have to be 'excluded', provided it is a representative sample of all your students rather than a particular type of student which is socially excluded. They can have a turn later, or be incorporated into the project as your organisation of it becomes more fluent, automatic and confident.

Besides, if any evaluation is to be carried out, it will be useful also to check the progress of a comparison group of children who have not (for the time being) been involved in the peer tutoring.

Contact Constellation

Most peer tutoring is done in a one-to-one situation, but it can occur in small groups of three, four or five children. It is also possible to have two helpers working with a small group of several tutees, but this is more complex and really best done with students already quite sophisticated in peer tutoring methods.

Figure out whether you will have pairs or small groups. If you prefer the latter, what size of group? What is the overall ratio of helpers to helped?

If you choose small groups, it is important to make the rules for the group and the specific roles of helpers and helped very clear, or the children may spend more time arguing about organisation than actually getting on with the task in hand. You might also find that a small group encourages some students to be 'passengers', leaving the more vigorous and able students to do most of the work - if this is the case, the 'passengers' will gain nothing. It is much more difficult to become disengaged in a pair.

Most of the research on peer tutoring has been done with pairs rather than small groups, and the former arrangement may prove organisationally more simple, ultimately more satisfying for the 'pairs', and promote a maximum of time on task.

Ability

The range of ability in the children is a critical factor in selection and matching of helpers and helped. When drafting an initial matching on the basis of ability, the names of the available children should be ranked by the teacher in terms of their attainment in the curriculum area of helping. This can be done on the basis of teacher knowledge of the students in the class room situation, or on the basis of recent test results, or on a combination of these, or on any other indicators which the teacher deems reasonably reliable and relevant.

For a cross-ability peer tutoring project between an older and younger class, in which all the older students were helpers and all the younger students were helped, the teachers would produce a ranked list for each class, then pair the top helper with the top student to be helped, and so on down the list. A widely used rule of thumb is to try to keep a differential of about two years in attainment between helpers and helped in such a project.

For a cross-ability project within one class, in the one ranked list draw a line through the middle of the list separating helpers at the top from the helped at the bottom, and then pair the most able helper with the most able helped, and so on.

For a same-ability project (usually within one class, and often involving reciprocal helping), in the one ranked list pair the most able helper at the top of the list with the next most able student who is immediately next on the list, and so on.

Reciprocal peer tutoring is usually done with same-ability pairs, but not always. Some programs deliberately include a component requiring the weaker partner in a cross-ability pair to attempt to help the more able partner (even though the more able partner is unlikely to need it or benefit directly), so that the weaker partner can benefit from the cognitive challenge of helping and it does not all seem one-sided. Other programs have the partners helping each other in somewhat different areas, one partner being strong and a good helper in one area, the other being strong and a good helper in another area. This is often done when working with students with many special needs as well as special strengths, i.e. an uneven profile of skills. Areas of relative competence and strength can be identified with all students, even those with many special needs.

Of course there can be difficulties if the range of ability in helpers and helped is not evenly in parallel, perhaps if an older class of helpers is exceptionally able and those to be helped a particularly poor 'year', or if the spread of attainment in one group is very wide or very narrow or very uneven. Do not worry too much - just match them up as best you can and see what happens - this is not an exact science. Just remember to try to maintain a helper/helped differential which is neither too big nor too small, to maximise the likelihood of gains for both helpers and helped.

In some projects, the alternative approach has been taken of pairing the most able helper with the least able student to be helped, but this creates the situation where the gap in ability is so wide that little stimulation is available for the helper, who is thus unlikely to make attainment gains although probably providing high quality and masterful helping for their partner. This arrangement also leaves students of very similar ability in the middle rankings struggling to help each other, which can look like "the blind leading the blind".

Relationships

The student's ability is the most important, but by no means the only, factor which must be taken into account. Pre-existing social relationships in the peer group must also be considered.

Obviously it would be undesirable to pair a child with another child with whom there is a pre-existing very poor relationship. However, do not adapt very many of the draft matched pairings on this basis, since part of the value of peer tutoring is to give students a secure framework within which to relate productively. They do not need to learn to relate to peers to whom they can already relate, they need to learn to relate to students with whom they cannot readily relate.

On the other side of the coin, to pair children with their 'best friends' of the moment is unlikely to be a good idea, particularly as the friendship may be of short duration. When children ask "can I work with my friend?", they often mean "can I not-work with my friend?".

Especial care is necessary with the pairings in cases where the helped students are known to be of a particularly timorous or over-dependent personality, or helpers are known to be rather dominant or authoritarian by nature. You can also find this the other way round.

Participant Partner Preference

You might think it desirable to take the individual preferences of the participants themselves into account in some way, and some children might surprise you with the maturity they show in selecting a helper they think would be effective in this role. However, note the point made above about learning to make new relationships. Also consider that to allow completely free student selection of helper is likely to generate a degree of chaos, not least because some helpers will be over-chosen, while others may not be chosen at all, quite apart from the question of maintaining the requisite differential in ability.

One possible compromise is to have the students to be helped express their preferences in writing in a 'secret vote', with each allowed to express up to three choices. In cross-age projects where the potential helpers may be unfamiliar to the helped, some project organisers have had the students to be helped express three preferences based on photographs of the potential helpers. This can make a lot of extra work, however.

The gender balance in the class can present a problem, particularly if there are more girls than boys, since initially some boys (at least in elementary school) express reluctance at the prospect of being helped by a girl. Needless to say, this reluctance often disappears fairly quickly where the teacher allocates a female helper to a male student to be helped and instructs them to get on with it, but the helped student may still have great difficulty justifying what is going on to his friends at recess time. However, one effect of this kind of cross-gender helping may well be to improve relationships and dispel stereotypes.

Many of these social considerations apply equally to the establishment of pairings of mixed race. Peer tutoring can offer a focus for social contact between children who might otherwise be inclined to avoid each other owing to completely unfounded assumptions or anxieties.

Standby Helpers

It is always worthwhile to nominate a 'supply' or 'stand-by' helper or two, to ensure that any absence from school of the usual helper can be covered. Children acting as spare helpers need to be particularly stable, sociable and competent in the curriculum area of the project, since they will have to work with a wide range of students to be helped.

However, do not worry about imposing a burden on the spare helpers, as they may be expected to benefit substantially. In cross-age or cross-institution projects, in which it may be more difficult to ascertain regular and frequent helping contact, more standby helpers may need to be appointed. If there is a danger of any volunteer helpers dropping out before the end of the project, there are again implications for nominating standbys to fill this sort of gap.

Recruiting

Recruiting is of course only necessary if the peer tutoring project is voluntary. The project organiser must decide whether all the class are to be involved, or whether to start with a small group of volunteers and use them as a model of enjoyment which will persuade the rest of the class of the desirability of joining in a little later. There is some advantage in leaving the more diffident children to consider their decision at leisure, since a definite positive commitment will certainly get the project off to a better start. Public demonstration is the most potent form of advertising.

In a project involving same-age peer tutoring within a single class, recruitment will be no problem. At least half of the class will readily volunteer when the nature of the exercise is briefly described. As noted above, your difficulty will be that these are unlikely to be a representative group. You will have to think about how you might stratify this to obtain a representative group.

In cross-age and cross-institution projects, recruitment is always more complex, and publicity more difficult to arrange. Again, it is as well to work in the first instance with well-motivated participants, provided they are reasonably representative. Start small, and as the project progresses momentum should be developed which inevitably draws in other students.

Where helped or helpers do not already exist as a naturalistic group, they may need to be approached individually. In this circumstance, a clear form of words should be prepared which is used consistently in all invitations, to dispel any anxieties which may be aroused by the initial approach. Contact should preferably be made personally, but some project co-ordinators have utilised written invitations, and publicity by advertisements on posters and handbills, and in newspapers and magazines. The impact of transmission of good news by word of mouth through the 'grapevine' should not be underestimated.

Parental Agreement

The question of parental agreement often arises in connection with peer helper projects. Experience shows that involvement in such a project is usually sufficiently interesting for the students to result in many of them mentioning it at home. This can result in a few parents getting strange ideas about how teachers are using their time (and their students).

It is thus usually desirable for a brief note from school to be taken home by both helpers and helped, explaining the project very simply and reassuring parents that the project will have both academic and social benefits for helpers as well as helped. If a regular home-school newsletter exists, mention of the project there might be sufficient. The necessary minimum of information should be given, couched in a simple and straightforward but reassuring format. (See the 'Information for Parents' leaflet on the Problem-Solving web site - which is intended to serve this purpose. It may be freely customised and photocopied.)

Incentives/Reinforcement

Particularly in North America, some peer tutoring projects have incorporated some form of payment or tangible reward for helpers, and sometimes tangible rewards for the helped. This is however very unusual in Europe, and there are clearly cultural differences in expectations, quite apart from the question of availability of finance to support this.

The majority of organisers of peer tutoring projects prefer to rely on the intrinsic motivation of helpers and helped alike, using tangible extrinsic reinforcement sparingly, only with students who really need such measures, and then only to engineer an initial 'flying start'.

There is strong evidence that both helpers and helped in a well-organised project not only benefit academically but also develop rewarding social relationships and actually enjoy themselves, so extrinsic tangible reinforcement should be unnecessary.

Some project organisers do utilise badges of identification, certificates of merit and effort, and very small 'prizes' such as pens, but these have much more import at the social psychological level as a token of esteem and an indicator of belonging than as any form of tangible reward.

Social Reinforcement and Modelling

Peer tutoring does of course include a great deal of 'social reinforcement' by way of praise, both private and public. Students will differ in their preferences for public vs. private praise. In a group setting, it is also likely to involve 'vicarious reinforcement' - students observing that peer tutoring is visibly socially rewarding for other students, and therefore believing that such rewards can also be gained by themselves.

Teachers should seek to publicly highlight the important components of praiseworthy functional behaviour quite specifically, to capitalise on this effect. The progressive introduction of component skills required to perform well, and immediate repeated practice at using these newly acquired skills, will also be important for less able students. Younger and less able children have difficulty attending to modelled events for long periods, distinguishing relevant from irrelevant cues, and organising information. They are also more easily swayed by immediate consequences of their actions, whereas older and more able students can generally keep longer-term goals in mind and are more likely to perform actions consistent with their goals and values.

Seeing others succeed or fail, or be rewarded or punished, creates outcome expectations, and students are more likely to perform actions when they believe they will be successful or rewarded than when they expect to fail or be punished. However, students' interpretations of reinforcement of others may depend on their confidence and belief in their ability to reproduce the reinforced behaviours. Observing similar peers succeed can raise observers' self-efficacy and motivate them to try the task, because they are apt to believe that if their peers can succeed, they can as well. This is especially true when students are uncertain about their capabilities, are unfamiliar with a (new) task, or have previously experienced difficulties in learning and now doubt whether they can succeed.

Correspondingly, observing similar others fail or have difficulty may lead students to believe they lack the competence to do well, which can lead to avoidance. These considerations may be particularly important for students who have limited histories of receiving reinforcement for appropriate behaviour (e.g. behaviourally disordered students).

Students learn new skills and strategies by observing models. Peer models are most influential in situations where perceived similarity to the model provides information about one's own abilities and the appropriateness of behaviours. Observing competent models perform actions that lead to success conveys information about the sequence of actions to use to succeed. Models are informative in another way. Most social situations are structured so that the appropriateness of behaviours depends on such factors as age, gender, or status. By observing modelled behaviours and their consequences, people form outcome expectations about which behaviours are likely to be rewarded or punished, and people's actions are based on their expectations. Of course, some students will lack the ability to identify the important features of modelled acts or the meaning of modelled responses, and this will need scaffolding by the teacher.

The most effective models are thus probably those who are not generally more competent than their observers, but who become competent at performing modelled responses over time. Such peer models are 'proximal' and credible in that they have started where the observer currently is, and model not only current competence, but also step-wise strategies to achieve that level of competence, and (importantly) the socio-emotional aspects of 'coping'. This might be particularly important with students who have a history of learning failures.

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E: Technique For Helping

At an early stage, you need to decide whether to opt for Fixed or Reciprocal Role peer tutoring, since that engages with decisions about same-ability or cross-ability matching, as well as with decisions about the type of helping technique to be used.

Naturally, the helping technique you choose to use will need to be appropriate for the chronological and developmental age of the target students, both helpers and helped.

In Problem-Solving with BP, the "packaged" choices are interaction through mathematical games, or the systematic set of generically applicable tutoring behaviours known as Duolog Maths. These are not mutually exclusive, but caution is needed regarding possible information overload in participants. If you start with games, you might well be able to introduce some elements of Duolog Maths in addition incrementally as you go along.

There are obviously considerable attractions in using a pre-defined and packaged helping technique, since one may build on the experience of previous workers and avoid unnecessary anxiety about the appropriateness of what one is attempting. Additionally, there will usually be a background of research evidence with which one may compare one's own results. The use of a pre-existing package is thus strongly recommended for those embarking on their first peer tutoring project. Once experience in the field has been gained, exotic and esoteric new techniques can be the subject of individual experimentation.

General Peer Tutoring Skills

Some workers have tried to avoid the rigidity sometimes inherent in some very highly structured packaged techniques (with or without special materials) by training helpers in more general helping skills. These could include how to present tasks, how to give clear explanations, how to demonstrate tasks and skills, how to prompt or lead pupils into imitating skills, how to check on helped performance, how to give feedback on performance, how to identify consistent patterns of error or problem in responses, and how to develop more intensive remedial procedures for those patterns of error, for instance.

It is obvious that this range of skills is considerably sophisticated. Nevertheless, particularly where relatively able and mature helpers are being used, programs have taken such wide ranging training on board. Various workers have attempted to categorise the requisite skills involved in a number of ways.

Training in ways of giving clear instructions without unnecessary elaboration or the use of difficult vocabulary has been included in some projects. The appropriate point at which to resort to demonstration of the requisite skill may be covered, as may details of how and when prompts should be used. Helpers have been trained in how to give systematic instruction, how to observe responses closely, how to give encouraging but accurate feedback regarding the response, and how to respond differentially to different kinds of student response. Other relevant helper skills have included the identification of areas where the helped student needs extra help, systematic mastery checking, record keeping, the issue of token reinforcement, and the ability to deal with 'take-homes' and home back-up reinforcers.

All of this sounds complicated and ambitious, but care must be taken not to underestimate the abilities of helpers, potential or actual. Many helpers may be well versed in a variety of helping behaviours in other environments, and for many of them training and helping behaviours will merely require the development or shaping of more precise skills from existing repertoires of behaviour, rather than instruction from a baseline of no skill at all. However, the demands of this kind of generalist approach are not inconsiderable, both cognitively and socially, and the introduction of such an approach with young or relatively less able children should be left to the experienced peer tutoring project organiser.

General Social Skills

Because peer tutoring involves interaction, social skills inevitably play a part. Teachers might wish to prepare for the introduction of peer tutoring by introductory work with the class on friendship and its meanings and implications. Any preliminary activities which serve to foster a collaborative ethos among the students should prove useful. Including social "ice-breakers" as part of first encounters in training meetings is desirable. This can develop to the greater complexities of establishing rapport, sharing interest, verbal and non-verbal social skills, and so on.

Helping involves a very subtle social process. Some programs take pains to instruct helpers in the establishing of an initial rapport, giving hints on the initiation of conversation, discovering something about the helped and their interests, the importance of revealing things about oneself in order that the helped may do likewise, and so on. It is obviously important for the helper to learn about the interests of the helped in a variety of areas, especially since discovery of a shared interest will do much to cement the bond between the two. In addition to the verbal and non-verbal social skills involved in praising, the importance of aspects of behaviour such as physical proximity, eye contact and posture may be incorporated in initial training for helpers.

The attitudes the helper brings to the task are obviously very important, and some workers have dwelt on creating a positive orientation or 'set' to helping in the helpers from the outset. In some programs, helpers have been carefully given a complete overview of the structure of the various components and the aims of the project, to encourage ownership and enhance motivation. The importance of positive attitudes in encouraging regular attendance has been emphasised, and considerable attention given to means of establishing good rapport with helped and stimulating positive motivation in the helped. Sometimes information about the problems of the helped has been given to the helpers in order to develop empathy. Equally, helpers have sometimes been advised about the dangers of feeling too 'sympathetic' towards the helped, and falling too readily into the trap of providing unconscious prompts and excessive help which might foster over-dependence.

Other relevant helper skills have included the ability to manage and refer to any contracts which have been made in respect of the project, and the ability to discuss the progress of the helped with the project organiser or other supervisor, and the helped student themselves.

Drill & Practice vs. Conceptual Challenge

Peer tutoring is undoubtedly valuable for giving students supported and therefore largely successful positive practice. However, many of the earlier peer tutoring projects were completely preoccupied with repetitive drill (based on simplistic interpretations of behavioural or precision teaching methods), and arguably failed to capitalise on the many other channels through which peer assisted learning can have its effects. Certainly drill activities are typically summative (preoccupied with the correctness of the final product), rather than formative (concerned with the strategic efficiency and effectiveness of the process of arriving at the product).

When introducing peer tutoring to younger or less able children, an element of routine drill may not be bad to start with, since its simplicity and predictability are likely to boost the confidence of the newly initiated. However, such a focus on surface behaviour can rapidly become mechanistic and boring (death by flash card), and does not have the impact of more complex forms of helping technique. A balance between convergent and divergent activity is needed, which is relevant to needs of participants and purpose of peer tutoring project.

Increasingly, peer tutoring methods are being applied to areas of much greater and more complex intellectual challenge, involving more divergent thinking.

Combinations of the Above

The categories referred to above are in no way mutually exclusive, and combinations of aspects of these methods may well be desirable and necessary for a successful project.

Correction Procedure

Errors imply failure, and failure creates stress, and stress can produce a negative reaction in the helped, and possibly also in a helper who feels that errors are an indication of incompetence on their part. To avoid irritation, frustration and disharmony in the helping relationship, all peer tutoring techniques must include some form of pre-specified error correction procedure.

Whatever this is, it needs to be quick, simple and consistently applicable, easy and non-stressful for both children. If in doubt, the standard simple direct instruction model is a good one. This stipulates that whenever the helped makes an error, the helper signals (usually non-verbally) that an error has been made, the location of the error, possibly the type of the error, demonstrates or models the correct response, leads or prompts the helped student to imitate the correct response, checks that the helped student can produce the correct response unaided, and at some later point re-checks that the helped student can still emit the correct response on request.

This kind of error correction framework can be applied to almost any curriculum area and any kind of mistake, and has the advantage of not leaving the helped student to struggle for any significant length of time before support is forthcoming.

The helper might then go on to prompt their partner to offer alternatives, and comment on those alternatives. Very rarely should the helper give their partner the "right" answer - or what they think is the right answer, since this encourages dependence, and might even lead to further error.

Master Reference Source

Well engineered peer tutoring techniques support or scaffold high quality questioning and discussion, and well engineered correction procedures scaffold the quality of correction, but what about scaffolding the accuracy of correction?

If you are operating a convergent form of peer tutoring, in which definite "right answers" do exist, you should consider whether the helpers should be able to access those correct answers in some way (e.g., by referring to the correct solutions often given at the back of textbooks of math problems). This is only likely to be possible where the peer tutoring participants are working with materials from a prepared finite pool, to which model answers are available.

Providing some master reference source of correct responses might be particularly necessary in same-ability tutoring, or other forms of peer tutoring in which the helper's mastery of the peer tutoring curriculum area might be in doubt. It might also prove particularly useful during the practice element of initial training for peer tutoring where the practice was done with standardised items for all participants.

Praise

If well-considered error correction procedures are carefully and consistently deployed by the helpers, much of the aggravation which can arise when non-teachers try to help children with learning will be avoided. However, merely taking the latent heat out of a relationship is not enough if the result is bland neutrality.

We would wish the helpers to go further than this, and specification is needed of the nature, frequency and circumstances for usage of praise in the helping relationship. It is useful to specify some sort of minimum frequency with which praise should be deployed, but even more important to give a clear indication of those circumstances in which it should always be used.

In Paired Reading, for instance, praise is specified as requisite whenever the child correctly reads a long word where the helper expected an error, and whenever the helped self-corrects before the helper intervenes.

Many helpers find that the giving of verbal praise does not come naturally to them, and they may need considerable practice and feedback in this before an adequate level of performance is achieved. In training, the verbal and non-verbal aspects of praise should be emphasised, since the use of routine praise words in a boring monotone will not have the desired effect. In addition, in some helping relationships the use of a pat on the back or some other gesture may serve to add variety to the social reinforcement.

Some helpers have a very restricted vocabulary of praise words, and part of helper training could include a listing of appropriate vocabulary. In cases of doubt, helpers can be encouraged to discuss this with their helped student, since the latter may be able to generate more culturally appropriate praise vocabulary. In addition to verbal and non-verbal praise, the record keeping inherent in the project organisation may include an element of written praise from both helpers and supervising professionals.

Trouble Shooting

In a first project, particularly when using a self-constructed rather than pre-packaged technique, the project organiser may not be prepared for the sorts of difficulties which arise in helping relationships and the helping process.

Once some experience has been gained, it is worthwhile producing some sort of simple directory of common problems with some indication of how these may be solved. Even if this is not made available in written form to the helpers as a training resource, it will serve as a very handy reference for you.

You may rest assured that there will be constant additions to this collection with every subsequent project, for no projects are quite the same and certainly no children are quite the same.

One advantage of using a standard packaged technique for a first project is that clues about likely problems will be found in the literature, together hopefully with some indications of solutions which other people have found effective.

Either way, it will be worthwhile making clear at the outset that problems may arise which are not the fault of either helper or helped. If this is not done, the helper or helped may be inclined when difficulties are first encountered to either blame themselves for the problem or to blame their partner - both of these are highly undesirable.

It is as well for the pair to work on the assumption that if the relationship or process is not working satisfactorily, there is something wrong with the design of the materials or the design of the technique, and they should seek professional advice immediately in order that appropriate adjustments can be made.

As well as communicating this assumption to the helpers and helped, it will be as well for the project co-ordinator also to make it an essential foundation of their conceptual framework. If the peer tutoring is not working, it is not the fault of the children, it is because you haven't organised it correctly!

Behavioural Methods

Where a more overtly behavioural method is in use, implying not only detailed checking of task achievement but also the dispensation of tangible or token reinforcement for task achievement, it will be extremely important that the criteria for correct performance are carefully specified.

There is nothing worse than a helped student who feels that their helper is being unduly 'harsh' in their interpretation of what constitutes a correct response. (Where only social reinforcements are on offer, this has much less importance than where tangible and countable indices of success such as tokens are in use.)

Quite apart from the possibility of negative impact on the intrinsic motivation of the helped, heavy use of tangible reinforcement raises questions about the effectiveness of such reinforcement in the long term. The same tangible reinforcer dispensed routinely and massively can produce a saturation effect, and the organisational problems of introducing constant variety may be considerable. The token system is of course intended to get round this problem, but this equally brings its own administrative complexities in relation to the system for exchanging tokens for subsequent tangibles, activities or other treats.

Tokens can of course lead to social rather than tangible (edible, financial) reinforcement. Thus tokens can be exchanged for minutes of off-task conversation or the opportunity to play a game or work on the computer during class time with friends (assuming the friends also have tokens to spend in this way), or perhaps for favoured activities (previously available automatically, now available only contingently and when earned).

Mutual Gain

A final check - even if using a packaged technique, are you sure that the peer tutoring is engineered so that both helpers and helped will benefit? How can you be sure? Take nothing for granted. Does your chosen method maximise use of all available channels for both helper and helped?

Evidential Basis

Another safety check - does your chosen peer tutoring strategy have good empirical evidence on effectiveness? If you have just invented it, make sure that you evaluate it very carefully. If it is a packaged technique, make sure that you can actually locate evidence that it works - beware the packaged techniques which are promoted commercially or by enthusiasts which have no evidential basis, although they might claim to have.

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F: Contact

Is peer tutoring contact to be scheduled, or allowed to occur spontaneously as needed? Scheduling is almost always necessary in the early weeks of a project, in order to assure that partners have sufficient regular and frequent practice time to consolidate their peer tutoring skills and that the teacher can be on hand to monitor their performance and give them feedback and extra coaching as needed. Once the teacher is certain that partners are skilful and confident enough to work with much less support and supervision, allowing them to engage in peer tutoring at times of their own choosing becomes possible. Naturally, the nature of contact you choose to allow will need to be appropriate for the chronological and developmental age of the target students, both helpers and helped.

The teacher might choose to launch a peer tutoring project by training everyone together, then schedule peer tutoring time for different sub-groups within the class at different times. This does however require the teacher to be doing peer tutoring monitoring with one sub-group and other activities simultaneously with other sub-groups. There is always the risk that the quality of peer tutoring monitoring will suffer. Consequently, most teachers find it easier to have all their students doing peer tutoring simultaneously.

Time

A basic decision is whether the helping is to occur wholly in class time, wholly in the children's recess or break time, or in a combination of both. If the helping is to occur entirely in class time, it can be kept under teacher supervision, but will usually require time-tabling, which may rob the exercise of a degree of spontaneity. If the helping is to occur in the children's recess or break time, some very mature pairs can be left to make their own arrangements, but this is a much greater imposition on helpers and helped alike, and the momentum of the project may begin to peter out as the novelty begins to wear off. Some time-tabling may thus be necessary even during the children's recess or leisure time, so that the size and nature of the commitment involved is visible to all from the outset.

The best arrangement may well be to schedule a basic minimum of contact during class time, but make available the possibility for helping pairs to negotiate further sessions in their own break time according to their own levels of enthusiasm. Some projects have arranged for contact after school, or indeed before school starts in the morning. Such arrangements are of course highly constrained by the transport arrangements for homeward-bound children and should only be attempted if the enthusiasm of the participants is high. Some projects have worked a system of after-school helping, sometimes supported by financial incentives for the helpers, but this is expensive and certainly more complex to organise.

Place

Most peer assisted learning takes place in schools, but it can also be found in libraries, community centres, and other neighbourhood locations which are easy of access.

With cross-institution peer tutoring, the transport and movement implications of getting the helpers and helped together will need careful consideration - there is much which can go wrong here. This might also be true for cross-building, cross-campus, or even cross-class peer tutoring.

Finding the physical space to accommodate the pairs can be a problem. In a cross-age helper project within one school, particularly where two full classes are involved, it is possible for half of the pairs to work in the classroom of the helped students and the other half in the helpers' classroom. Finding physical space for the helping to occur during recess or break times may be considerably more difficult if there are problems of recess time supervision and/or children are not allowed access to classrooms.

Clearly, a positive social atmosphere is more likely to be fostered if the children have adequate personal space and are comfortable during their helping. An ambience with a degree of informality is therefore preferable, but the situation should not be so informal as to incorporate many distractions from the helping process. A much used leisure area with heavy passing traffic is therefore unlikely to be satisfactory.

Noise too may be a problem. In peer assisted learning within one classroom, the noise generated by 15 or so pairs of enthusiastic children reading together and engaged in lively discussion can be quite considerable. This is exacerbated in a school with an open internal design, and may generate complaints from other classes who are pursuing a more formal curriculum. It is worth checking the degree of noise transmission in advance, in order to be prepared for this type of complaint.

The availability of an adequate quantity of comfortable seating can also be problematic. Even in a simple reading project, to find enough chairs which may be situated side by side and are reasonably comfortable for both participants might not be easy. Where the peer assisted learning curriculum is more formal and incorporates some paper and pencil work, the availability of tables also has to be considered.

In cross-grade projects, the noise and inconvenience generated by the movement of students from one location to another is also relevant. This is in addition to the other complications of such projects in terms of matching timetables, etc. Seating arrangements need to be such that the mobility of professional supervisors will not be impaired. In cross-institution peer assisted learning, the 'imported' students will need to be briefed about the layout of the building, and shown round - this is, of course, ideally done by other students.

Duration

Each individual helping period should last for a minimum of 15 minutes. Little worthwhile can occur in less time than this, after you have allowed for some lack of punctuality and general settling down. If it is possible for those who so desire to continue for 20 or 30 minutes, this is advantageous. Helping sessions of 30 minutes certainly seem to be the most common period found in the literature. It might be possible for the minimum of 15 minutes to occur just before a natural recess or break time, and there could be provision for the helping pairs continuing into their own recess time if they so desire.

Helping periods as long as 60 minutes are very unusual, and it would be rare for helping to be scheduled as long as this. It is always better to leave the helping pair less than exhausted and still a little hungry at the end of their joint experience, in order that they will come to their next session with positive attitudes and high energy levels.

Some pairs will finish their peer tutoring task before the end of the scheduled session, so it is wise to have other activities to hand to keep them productively occupied. If a few students in a class have opted out of a voluntary peer tutoring program, the teacher also has to consider how they are to be engaged in learning individually during the peer tutoring session.

Frequency

To ensure that a project has a significant impact, the frequency of helping contact needs to be at least three times per week, especially in the early weeks when the partners are still developing fluency with the method, and need close monitoring and further coaching. Contact frequency of this order is very commonly found in the literature. However, if four or five weekly contacts can be arranged and student motivation can be sustained at this frequency, so much the better. Children involved in peer helper projects rarely object to daily helping, as most of them find it interesting and rewarding. Some pairs may organise their own impromptu sessions in their own recess or break time whether the teacher mandates this or not.

Some projects have incorporated twice daily contacts, but this is rare. Although the literature suggests that the greater the frequency of helping sessions, the more impact a project is likely to have, nevertheless a point of diminishing marginal returns may be found. There is also the problem of finding sufficient time in a very crowded curriculum and school day.

Project Period

The peer tutoring project should be launched with reference to an initial fixed period of commitment. It is useful for both helpers and helped to be clear about what they are letting themselves in for, and how long a course they need to be able to sustain. Additionally, the literature suggests that short-term projects tend to generate bigger effect sizes. Although this may be merely due to capitalisation on sheer novelty, teachers are much less inclined than academics to be dismissive about the value of the Hawthorne Effect (the tendency for the introduction of any new form of organisation to produce short-term increments in performance).

Apart from the desirability of keeping children hungry for 'a little more', constraints on resources may dictate a short initial experimental period. Particularly in a situation where not all members of a class are involved, there may be a strain on professional staffing in terms of the need to supervise two separate groups of children who in the normal course of events would all be in one classroom under the supervision of one teacher.

So a minimum project period of six weeks is suggested, since it would barely be possible to discern significant impact in less time than this. Popular project periods are eight weeks and ten weeks, which fit comfortably within an average term or semester, and it is not usually desirable to fix a period of longer than twelve weeks for an initial commitment.

It will be much better to review the project at the end of a short initial period, and to obtain feedback from the participants and evaluate the outcomes, and at that stage make conscious joint decisions about improvements or future directions. One thing to definitely avoid is letting the whole thing drift on interminably until it runs out of steam.

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G: Materials

Particularly for peer tutoring, learning materials will be necessary. Naturally, the materials you choose to use will need to be appropriate for the chronological and developmental age of the target students, both helpers and helped. These might be special materials which are specific to a 'packaged' program, or they might be regular classroom materials. Occasionally they might be specially made within the school, customised to the requirements of the project, produced by the peer tutoring partners themselves or by other volunteers or by administrative staff under the guidance of the teacher.

Structure

In some forms of peer tutoring, highly structured materials are used to guide the interactive behaviour of the partners. In other forms of peer tutoring, the emphasis is much more upon training in highly structured but generally applicable interactive behaviours, which can then be applied to any relevant materials which are available.

There is some evidence that peer assisted learning is more effective in raising attainment when structured materials are used than in other circumstances. Certainly, the availability of carefully sequenced materials which take the helped student step-by-step, ensuring success along the way, may be easier for helpers to follow reliably and may reduce the need for lengthy and complex training.

However, considerable costs may be involved in the preparation of such materials, or in the purchase of existing structured packages where these are relevant and available. Also, project organisers should beware of the introduction of so much structure that the responses of helper and helped alike become rigid and mechanical. Materials that are too highly structured may inhibit helper initiative and reduce the opportunities for helpers to participate creatively. Complex structured materials might also suffer from automatic inhibition of generalisation, in that their restricted availability may prevent additional spontaneous helping from occurring in the project participants' own free time.

Much of the early work in the area showed high effectiveness with structured materials delivered by helpers in a pre-specified and structured manner, but evidence on generalisation and maintenance of gains was not always presented. In more recent years, there has been more emphasis on the utilisation of structured techniques which specify interactive behaviour but are of broad-spectrum applicability to a wide range of materials which need not themselves be structured and are readily available.

Difficulty and Choosing

A related question concerns the control of the difficulty level of the materials. In a very highly structured sequence, some form of placement test may be necessary to determine at what point the helped student should commence. Subsequently, in this situation, mastery of each task determines progression to the next, so the sequence is predetermined, if not the speed of progress.

Other projects have worked on the basis of drafting individual educational plans for each student to be helped, implying pre-specification of a learning sequence for each student, but this is enormously time-consuming.

Other approaches which are less dependent on highly structured materials have allowed some choice by the helped and/or helper from a variety of materials which are nevertheless compressed to be within a band of difficulty. More recently still, techniques have been developed which allow helpers and helped free access to materials controlled in difficulty up to the ceiling level of competence of the helper. In these cases, helpers and helped have often been taught skills to enable them to choose mutually interesting materials at an appropriate level of difficulty for both. Choice by negotiation between the pair is the general rule in these circumstances.

However good the training in choosing appropriate materials may be, some of the children in the project will be slow to acquire the requisite skills. This may be because they have lacked practice in this respect in the past, and have become over-dependent on teacher direction. Thus, those members of the project who have not developed the requisite choosing skills after the first two or three weeks of the project may need further gentle encouragement or guidance from the project co-ordinator.

Some projects have gone further down the road towards independent control of learning by vesting the responsibility for choice entirely with the helped student. (Of course, in all circumstances the difficulty of the material must be controlled to be within the level of the helper's competence.) Unless the teaching of choosing skills is particularly effective, this can result in episodes of inefficient helping, and runs the risk of the helper becoming bored, so some degree of negotiation and compromise is usually seen as desirable - and is of course entirely in the spirit of 'co-operative learning'.

Availability and Sources

Materials are expensive, in cost to buy, in time to arrange and collect loans from resource centres, in time to devise, in time to manufacture and in cost of raw materials. Peer assisted learning works by promoting increased time spent on task, and the speed of progress through materials can often be much more rapid than is normal in ordinary classroom teaching. This can create an embarrassment for the project co-ordinator, who can find the stock of relevant and available materials is rapidly exhausted.

In some circumstances it may be possible for the pairs to make some materials, if not for themselves than perhaps for other pairs, but if this is done the project organiser needs to be satisfied that such joint manufacturing is in itself serving an educational purpose. Carefully structured materials are already available from commercial publishers, but these packages are extremely expensive, and are likely to be beyond the reach of many project organisers, unless they are already available in school and not being used for another purpose, or can be loaned on a short-term basis from a library or other establishment.

A further consideration is the cost of consumables, and some projects involve the consumption of a substantial stock of paper, worksheets etc. Particularly in the area of peer assisted reading, the bringing in to the helping situation of materials gathered by the participants from outside of the school may be possible, and books or magazines may be obtained from participants' homes and local public libraries. Many projects operate on the basis of a collection of paper materials, but if you wish to extend into "electronic" peer assisted learning, the availability of computer hardware and relevant software may be highly desirable.

Access

A school may pride itself on the volume of relevant materials which it possesses, and forget to pay close attention to how easily the pairs can actually access to the material. In reading projects, it is not enough for the school to contain a large number of books, it is also necessary for the children to have very regular and frequent access to them. This is particularly so when the speed of progression through materials is typically much more rapid in the peer tutoring than is expected by teaching staff. It may be logistically easier to mount a special additional collection in some convenient area for access by the pairs. The same may apply to mathematical games or problem banks.

Project co-ordinators should also consider the relationship of the project to other school facilities (such as a book shop), the desirability of arranging visits to the local public library, and any other events relevant to the curriculum area of the helping project which can be arranged or are spontaneously occurring.

It is necessary to be clear about which member of the pair takes the initiative on access to materials - is this the job of the helper or helped or both? Do members of pairs need some form of special pass to give them access to otherwise forbidden areas of the school to facilitate easy access to materials? If high status is enjoyed by the helping project (as is usually the case), this kind of free access is seen by the children as a privilege and is very rarely abused.

Progression Criteria

Highly structured materials may have the advantage of inbuilt mastery criteria which make it very clear when the pair are to move on to the next section of the prescribed materials. At the other end of the spectrum, where pairs are allowed a free choice of materials irrespective of difficulty level, as in Paired Reading projects, the issue of progression criterion does not arise, since variability in difficulty level from day to day or week to week is usual, and accommodated by the helping technique.

In the grey area between these two extremes, issues may arise of who determines on the basis of what criteria when the helped student is (a) ready and (b) willing to move on to a fresh set of material, either covering different conceptual content or of more advanced difficulty. The specification of progression criteria will usually be seen by teachers as requiring their professional expertise, but this can be significantly time consuming. Those techniques and materials which have inbuilt progression criteria or have dispensed with the need for progression criteria altogether save the teacher valuable time in this respect.

Recording

It is almost certain that some form of records will be kept of the helping process, if only in terms of progression through materials (e.g. books which have been read by the partners). Given the potentially greatly increased volume of access to these materials, it is essential that the procedures for issuing and tracking materials are highly streamlined, quick and efficient - otherwise a major blockage to the smooth running of the project will ensue.

Recording might be done by the project organiser, some designated assistant such as a librarian or adult volunteer, or by the helpers or the helped themselves, or by some combination of these. Again, some cost is involved in terms of time for preparation, materials used, and time and space for storage and dispensation. There may be official forms constituting record sheets or cards, progress reports to complete, or probes and tests to be accessed at the appropriate moment. Clear specification is necessary of what recording materials are necessary, who is responsible for keeping the records safe and available, who completes them, who obtains them from stock when required, and who replenishes the stock as it is depleted.

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H: Training

Staff Training

Before teachers set out to train children in particular procedures, it is clearly important that teachers themselves are well versed in the methods to be used. All the relevant professionals need to be fully conversant not only with the technique in use but also the materials, especially where special or structured materials are to be an essential feature of the project.

Even for professional teachers (perhaps especially for professional teachers), there is great danger in assuming that you can learn enough about a technique from written or audio-visual information to be able to train the helpers and helped well. There is no substitute for being taught how to do it yourself by somebody with previous experience, and you will need to have practised the technique yourself on a child or colleague before trying to disseminate the method further. Actually tackling the tasks that the helpers and helped will be addressing themselves will give you extremely useful insight into the difficulties which they are going to face, and it will certainly not be time wasted. This does mean of course that time has to be found for relevant staff to attend training sessions, with all the implicit difficulties of covering for their classes meantime.

Participant Training - Organisation

It is essential that the initial launch of the project at the first training meeting goes well - your project must get off to a flying start rather than fall flat on its face.

Training the students individually or in pairs may be highly effective, but would be extremely time consuming and therefore not efficient, and most teachers opt to train the participants in groups.

The strong recommendation is to train helpers and helped together from the outset. By so doing, you ensure that both helpers and helped receive exactly the same message. In tailoring your training so that the helpers understand it, you will also improve its accessibility to the less able of the helpers. Importantly, training partners together from the start conveys the immediate impression that "we are all in this together", and also serves to avoid any helpers developing delusions of grandeur or superiority.

Remember that training meetings must always lead on immediately to direct practice of the techniques to be utilised, which is another reason for having helpers and helped together from the start. If in doubt, get them together earlier rather than later.

Venue and Space

You will need to specify well in advance the date, time and place of your training sessions. The number of training sessions, their length and frequency will also need to be made clear to all concerned. This allows the helpers and helped to look forward to their experience and (perhaps) become excited about the impending novel event. It also allows you to make very sure that colleagues are not going to claim the space you intend to use for practice for a last minute play rehearsal or some such.

The physical space in which training is going to occur will probably need the facility for all the participants to sit in a large group and listen to a talk and watch a demonstration, but there will also be a need for chairs (and possibly tables) to be available for subsequent practice, if this is to be incorporated in the same session (rather than taking place back in their regular classrooms). Thus, plenty of seats need to be available and their mobility to fulfil two purposes should be considered. Particularly with peer tutoring involving oral reading or discussion , remember that noise levels can be a problem, especially in the early stages of training when helpers and helped will not have learnt to modulate their volume.

Materials and Equipment

If audio-visual equipment (e.g. video) is to be used during the training session, try to ensure that you are prepared for Murphy's law to strike at the least opportune moment. The requisite equipment must be: not in use elsewhere, transportable to the location of the training, in good working order and compatible with basic utilities in the training space. Nothing is more distracting or disruptive to efficient learning than having, for example, to wait for an increasingly hysterical teacher to change the bulb in an overhead projector.

The materials to be used for the training session will also need to be readily and reliably available. You may choose to have available for scrutiny the whole range of possible materials, but for the actual practice it will be much better if the specific items and tasks for use by each pair during the practice session have been pre-selected, thus avoiding much student meandering while hunting for an appropriate item.

Even in projects where the helpers or helped are in general to be given a fairly free choice of materials and tasks, paradoxically the training meeting may be the one occasion where you need to control the difficulty level of the materials more rigidly. If, for example, you are using the Paired Reading technique, practice of the Reading Together aspect makes little sense if the helped has chosen a very easy book which he or she is quite capable of reading independently.

Participant Training - Content

Naturally, the training methods you choose to use will need to be appropriate for the chronological and developmental age of the target students, both helpers and helped.

Initial training might last as little as 30 minutes in total, although somewhat longer is usual. This might be in one block, or spread over a number of shorter step-wise sessions.

If the helpers and helped have not met previously, you will want to allow time for general introductions, and perhaps some co-operative ice-breaker activity in the working partnerships. Some teachers like to inject humour to relax the atmosphere, perhaps through a "how not to do it" role play by a pair of adults or students from a previous project.

Verbal Instruction

Some teachers tend to over-estimate the impact talking to children (lecturing) has upon subsequent behaviour, and this tends to be particularly true of teachers who are used to working with older age groups. Equally, teachers often over-estimate the ease with which children can assimilate information reliably from written materials. In fact, direct verbal instruction and written instruction (in pamphlets or lists of 'dos and don'ts') cannot be assumed to be effective training methods on their own, although they form essential components of any training procedure.

Certainly a verbal explanation of the overall structure and purposes of the project will be given by way of introduction, followed by further detailed explanation of the materials and techniques to be used. But keep it brief! Many children, particularly those with any learning difficulty, will be 'switching off after ten minutes of listening, if not earlier. Take care that the vocabulary you use in your verbal instruction is simple, and that any more unusual words you use are carefully defined for the children.

This issue commonly arises in relation to the use of words like 'tutor' and 'tutee', or 'monitor' and 'monitored', which some project co-ordinators working with young children prefer to substitute with words like 'helper' and 'helped'. In fact, providing care is taken to clearly define the meaning of the words in advance, their use with even young children can help to give the exercise an air of novelty and heighten its status.

Written Instruction

Written instruction may take the form of continuous prose in a pamphlet, but problems of assimilation may arise for some children. Obviously the readability of the pamphlet should be kept as low as possible, since it is desirable that both helper and helped are able to refer to it subsequently to check anything of which they may be unsure.

However, it may be much more useful to use various forms of checklist, a list of key words or cues, flow charts, diagrams, pictures or cartoons, and so on. For essential reminders about the most important 'rules', class wall posters or individual 'cue cards' may be helpful.

It is worth remembering the old adage that nobody reads anything which cannot be contained on one side of a piece of paper. People often do not turn over the page.

Demonstration

Having provided verbal and written instruction, it may be worthwhile allowing some time for questions and discussion. However, many of the questions and confusions arising could probably more readily be dealt with by proceeding very rapidly to a demonstration of the required behaviour.

This demonstration could be from a videotape available as a standard package from a support agency, or (more convincingly) one made in school. However, there is no need for such sophisticated technology, since it is often possible for the teachers to demonstrate how to use the technique and materials. This could be done with another teacher playing the role of the student to be helped, or with a willing and confident intending or previous helped student.

However, it is much safer to do this with another teacher or volunteer adult, since if they do not give a perfect demonstration (which is highly likely), you will be able to criticise them in front of the helpers and helped in a way which would be problematic with a student actor. Additionally, an adult actor is likely to be more visible and audible to a large group in a training meeting. A video has similar advantages, providing your video replay system is sufficiently large and of adequate quality.

Once a first successful project has been run, experienced helpers and helped can be brought back to demonstrate for subsequent groups of children embarking on the same experience, and this kind of demonstration tends to have the most impact of all. By then, participants should be sufficiently socially robust to be criticised in public, although it is likely that you will plan for some "deliberate mistakes".

Guided Practice And Feedback

Immediate practice of the helping technique is then essential, and feedback should be given from the professionals as soon as possible. In some projects, helpers practice the helping technique by role play on each other before being exposed to the helped, and this may be a useful form of organisation if the helping technique is particularly complex. In most cases however, it should be possible to proceed directly to practice in the intended helper/helped pairs.

Checking And Coaching

The behaviour of the pairs needs close monitoring during the practice session, and this can put a considerable strain on staffing resources. In a practice session of 20 to 30 minutes, a professional cannot expect to observe in detail the helping technique of more than five or six pairs. Thus if large groups are being trained, a substantial number of 'mastery checkers' who are conversant with the techniques and materials will need to be available - this is undoubtedly the most labour-intensive part of the training procedure.

Those pairs who demonstrate that they have learned the procedures rapidly can be praised and left to continue, but those pairs who are struggling or using deviant technique will need immediate extra individual coaching until they have fully mastered the procedures. Typically, each mastery checker is likely to find that two of the six pairs they are monitoring have learnt the technique extremely well and merely require social reinforcement, another two will have the technique more or less right albeit rather shakily, but are thought to be likely to improve with a little practice, while a further two will be doing something aberrant, and may need to be helped individually through considerable unlearning before a virtual re-teaching of the technique from scratch can occur. Much time will be spent with these last two pairs.

Organisation And Contracting

Once the children have been brought to mastery on techniques and materials, they will need briefing about the organisational 'nuts and bolts' of the day to day running of the project. This will include details about access to materials, means of record keeping, arranging times and places for helping contact, and the procedures for further help and follow up (some of these are dealt with in greater detail below). A brief written reminder of these organisational details may be helpful.

Depending on the nature of the peer tutoring project and the maturity and reliability of the helpers and helped, some teachers choose to establish 'contracts' between helpers and helped, or between project co-ordinators and helpers and helped. If the project is voluntary, some emphasis can be placed on this, with frequent reference to the undesirability of dropout, together with a little preaching about the significance of the decision to participate. Helpers and helped should decide consciously to be either in the project or out of it, and it should be made clear that half measures will not be acceptable (especially to the peer group).

In some projects, co-ordinators have made the two- or three-way contract written, with copies being held by all parties, in order to add to the solemn grown-up nature of the project. Of course, if a participant actually has to be berated by reference to the written contract, it may well be a sign that their motivation is any event so low that their continuing inclusion in the project is probably a waste of time. Efforts to retain unwilling helpers or helped in the project should therefore not be too strenuous, but the project co-ordinator should perhaps make a conscious decision about the extent to which any withdrawal should become public knowledge. If the motivation of other participants is in a fragile state, one 'escapee' could start a fashion. On the other hand, if the motivation of the other participants remains very strong, the odd one out who withdraws from the project may be subject to considerable approbation from the peer group.

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I: Process Monitoring

Especially in a first project, close monitoring will be essential to ensure that the maximum benefit is gained by all participants. During the course of the project, it is important that the co-ordinating teacher must keep a close eye on how things are going, in order to be able to:

Self-referral

In the spirit of co-operation which permeates peer assisted learning, the children themselves may be the first to report difficulty or seek help from the teacher. For example, at a minor level, in a reading project such self-referral may revolve around the pair asking the meaning of words which are unfamiliar to both helper and helped, but children should also be encouraged to report readily difficulties in accommodating to each other's habits without feeling that they are 'telling tales'.

Both helper and helped should be clear about to whom they can self-refer, and this of course has implications for the regular availability of 'expert' help. Participants might be encouraged to refer to other pairs for consultations about minor matters, or the teacher might consider this potentially too disruptive of other pairs. It is also helpful to give the participants a clear notion of the nature and size of problems which they should self-refer, together with some examples.

If a participant who is known to be of high status in the peer group can be prompted to be the first to refer a fairly minor problem, the other children will soon follow suit. In an oral reading project, it may be possible to designate a spare or back-up helper as 'word-finder', who circulates with a dictionary to help out pairs who have failed to understand a particular word. In some projects, a record is kept of problems arising in order that they may be discussed with all the project participants as a group at a later time.

Self-recording

Some form of recording of tasks completed during the project is highly desirable. Naturally, the self recording method you choose to use will need to be appropriate for the chronological and developmental age of the target students, both helpers and helped. Self recording gives a tangible demonstration of achievement and progress for the children, and is of considerable interest and utility for the supervising teacher. It is entirely logical that these records should be kept by the children themselves. With more wide-ranging helping materials, simple diaries can be kept by each pair, while projects utilising much more specific materials will generate much more precise records.

If the record keeping can be shared by helper and helped, then so much the better. In some projects the helped student records basic details such as date, materials completed and so on, while the helper records some words of praise or other comment. Even quite young children prove to be surprisingly good at writing positive comments about their partner, and learning to both give and receive praise without embarrassment is a valuable component of peer tutoring projects. By and large, helper comments should be as positive as possible, with any problems discussed directly with the project co-ordinator via self-referral.

In some cases the helpers soon begin to run out of imagination with respect to their positive comments, and this is an experience which has been shared by teachers who have had to write scores of end-of-year reports. The vocabulary of praise used by helpers can extend much further into the vernacular than a teacher would countenance for themselves, and ideas for praise words can be supplied by the helped student or the comments negotiated between helper and helped, although written down by the helper. Dictionaries of praise words and phrases can be brain-stormed and printed.

The records themselves should be checked each week by the supervising teacher, who can also record some favourable comment and add an official signature, perhaps together with other signs of approval such as points or merit marks for particularly deserving work. The participants will however need to be clear about who is going to check the self-recording, when this is to occur, where the records are to be delivered to, and how frequently this is to be done.

Discussion

Many projects feature review meetings between co-ordinating teachers and the helpers and helped. These can occur with the helpers and helped separately or together, and with them in groups or as individuals. The general aim is to discuss how the project is going in general, and any further specific problems.

Group sessions can be valuable for helpers and/or helped to discover that other pairs are having the same problems as they are. On the other hand, individual meetings will elicit more feedback from quiet and shy individuals, but will be much more time consuming. The frequency, duration and nature of such review meetings vary greatly from project to project. Sometimes regular 'planning' or 'de-briefing' meetings have been held between helpers and co-ordinators. It is probably useful if everybody knows in advance when these are going to occur, but self-referral in the meantime must also be encouraged.

In projects where tokens or other reinforcers are earned for improvement, some co-ordinators call group meetings to review comparative progress in terms of token acquisition. This can serve to give the whole project a strongly competitive flavour, which could do much to damage the promotion of co-operative learning. The announcement of the gaining of tokens by the group as a whole for the group as a whole may have fewer undesirable side effects.

Direct Observation

Close monitoring and some additional coaching or retraining for at least some participants are likely to be necessary to maintain procedural integrity. For example, deterioration in the use of prescribed error correction procedures is commonly reported in long-term evaluations, and has been directly linked with decline in student learning outcomes.

Of all the monitoring procedures, direct observation is by far the most revealing. Much can be gleaned by the supervising teacher observing individual pairs in rotation. The peer assisted learning session is not an opportunity for the teacher to 'get on with some marking'. On the contrary, the teacher should be circulating round the group observing and guiding children as necessary. In addition, it is possible to ask a particularly expert child helper who is not otherwise engaged to act as an observer in a similar way and report back to the teacher.

A simple checklist of the elements of the technique or other procedure may be useful to help to structure these observations. This could be very similar to, although perhaps a little more elaborate than, the written checklist of 'rules' or 'cues' which could have been given to the peer tutoring pairs as part of the initial training procedure. It is also possible to use video or audio recording for monitoring purposes, and this can be very useful for feedback to individual pairs or the group as a whole, as well as being valuable as a training aid for subsequent projects. However it does take time and expertise to arrange.

Teachers should expect to fade the strength and frequency of their prompting and monitoring with most students as the project progresses. Do not assume that more able students necessarily need less monitoring, however, since even though surface behaviour seems appropriate, this might mask considerable deviance, whether intentional or not. All students will continue to need some monitoring and prompting, although this can usually become more intermittent.

Project Process

Some form of check on basic organisational parameters of the project will also be necessary. The attendance of helpers and helped at scheduled contact times will particularly require monitoring. You may find, for instance, that helping sessions scheduled for the very beginning of the school day are affected by irregularities in public transport, while those which are scheduled for the end of the school day or after school may be rendered problematic at certain times of the year by inclement weather or dark nights. There may be other spontaneous events or acts of God which interfere with the physical space available for helping, or create many distractions to it. If review meetings are to be held between peer tutoring participants and project co-ordinators, attendance at these and response in them needs to be noted. The availability of appropriate materials will require constant monitoring, as will the frequency and nature of selection and use of these. Organisational problems must be nipped in the bud at the earliest possible moment, and adjustments or modifications introduced as soon as possible.

Recognition of Successful Students

Teachers often choose to celebrate or publicly recognise students during a peer tutoring project. The students recognised will become peer models whether the teacher intends this or not, so the choice of students to be recognised must be informed by this expectation. There are consequently dangers in publicly acknowledging during the course of the peer tutoring activity students who might well have improved in some way but whose performance is still considerably less than perfect. The precise reason or noteworthy aspect of the student's performance which led to the acknowledgement should be specified. In the event of doubt, such recognition should stay a private interaction between the teacher and the students.

Fraud

Teachers should watch for students who have not done what was asked of them and seek to cover this up by inventing or copying data or other evidence of activity. This is rare, but might happen with occasional disaffected students early in the life of a project.

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J: Assessment of Students

Some assessment of student progress in terms of learning outcomes is an automatic by-product of teacher process monitoring, especially by direct observation. The teacher will also be checking on student self-recorded evidence of progress through materials, although this might be less reliable as an indicator that learning has definitely taken place. Additionally, the teacher might make informal observations regarding any changes in general learning behaviour or learning style, or note any evidence of improved meta-cognitive awareness in either helpers or helped students (perhaps by eavesdropping on discussions between pairs).

Some peer tutoring procedures incorporate peer-administered tests or probes which are integral to helping procedure, as in Cued Spelling, for example. This is a form of peer-administered curriculum based measurement.

However, in order to closely track student progress, the teacher might use some form of regular and frequent curriculum based measurement - generalisation tasks, probes, mini-tests delivered and scored by the teacher.

While these might give very accurate, detailed and up-to-date information on the learning progress and current needs of students, they are very time-consuming to administer and score and interpret. Over the last decade, computer programs of increasing sophistication have become available to assist the teacher with the management of information about learning in the classroom. These forms of computerised curriculum based measurement are both delivered to the student and scored by the computer, which then analyses the results and advises the teacher of the outcome (and sometimes the diagnostic implications for action). They are sometimes termed "Learning Information Systems" (not to be confused with "Integrated Learning Systems", which also seek to incorporate individualised instruction and are much more expensive).

Another relatively recent development is the availability of norm-referenced tests of reading and mathematics which are delivered, scored and interpreted by the computer. Where such tests have a very large item bank, every test presented to every student on every occasion is different, which not only minimises student cheating but also enables the tests to be taken very frequently without scores being inflated by practice effects as students get to learn the test content. Such tests are of course not as closely tied to the peer tutoring curriculum as curriculum-based tests, but can still form a useful measure of student progress in terms of generalisation of skills to novel content.

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K: Evaluation

This topic is covered in the following section 8 of this manual.

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L: Feedback

The monitoring and evaluation information will need collating and summarising in some way, or (to be more precise) in two ways. A simple way of presenting the favourable results and information to the participants themselves is necessary to encourage them and promote further growth of confidence. Naturally, the type of feedback you choose to use will need to be appropriate for the chronological and developmental age of the target students, both helpers and helped. A more 'scientific' collation will be necessary to present to interested colleagues, particularly those who will try to pick holes in your report.

It is worth making clear from the outset who is to take responsibility for the collation of information in these various ways, otherwise it might lie around on scraps of paper forever. Decisions must be taken about how to summarise the data for the various purposes, what balance of verbal, numerical and graphic presentation to use, and whether to incorporate any analysis of statistical significance (and if so which).

Feedback to the children can be group or individual, with the helpers and helped separate or together. Do not assume that the children will be easily fobbed off by some vague generalisations from the teacher. They are likely to want something more tangible and structured than that. You must make a decision about whether individual pairs are given information about their own progress (bearing in mind that even if they are not given comparative information they will soon be asking their friends for this), or whether the group as a whole should merely be given information about overall improvement based on group averages.

As evaluation information is given to the participants, it is always useful to make the feedback process reciprocal, and encourage them to give you their views (verbally or in writing or both) on how the project went, and how it could be improved for another generation on a subsequent occasion. Very often the students will make suggestions which are contradictory, and therefore rather difficult to implement, but some of their suggestions will undoubtedly be insightful and extremely helpful when organising further projects.

At the end of the initial phase of the project, joint decisions have to be made about the future. At this point, the views of the participants must be taken very much into account. Some may wish to continue peer assisted learning with the same frequency, others may wish to continue but with lesser frequency, while a few may be wanting a complete rest at least for a while. When in doubt, a good rule of thumb is to go for the parsimonious option. It will be better to leave some of the children a little 'hungry' and have them pestering you to launch another project in six weeks time, rather than let peer tutoring meander on indefinitely until it quietly expires in a swamp of indifference.

At this point of decision-making, also beware of trying to cater for a wide variety of onward choices from different helping pairs. The organisation of the project could become unbelievably complicated if you attempted to accommodate the varying desires for continuation of large numbers of children. It is probably as well to stick with what the majority vote for. Peer assisted learning can thus be seen to be not only co-operative but democratic as well.

It might prove equally difficult to identify a significant voting majority for any particular proposed change, whether it be in technique, materials, curriculum area or form of organisation. It might also be difficult to obtain a majority view on whether pairings should be changed. Nevertheless, such discussions are useful as an exercise in democracy, language development and organisational problem solving, even if it is the project coordinator who at the end of the day has to make the final decision.

We have noted that most projects have preferred to use the more naturalistic and readily available social reinforcement. You may feel it desirable for those helpers and helped who have completed the initial phase of commitment of your project satisfactorily to receive some form of public commendation for their efforts. Teachers might choose to celebrate those who have made most progress from their own individual baseline, or those who exerted the most effort. Acknowledged gains can of course be in attainment or in the affective or social domain. Some projects present the children with some tangible tokens of social approval and esteem - certificates of merit or effort, books, badges, pens, and so on. These can be presented in a public gathering in the school, but with older students public praise needs to be used carefully. It is always worth seeking the views of the participants on the nature of any ceremonial. Needless to say, both helpers and helped should be equally eligible for commendation. Some projects have chosen to count a peer assisted learning experience for academic credit, perhaps including the helper's efforts as part of some community service program.

Quite apart from its value as reinforcement for the peer tutoring pairs, some form of public commendation is also useful publicity which may assist in the later recruitment of new helpers.

Reassurance

The danger with any form of instruction is of course that by breaking a naturally acquired skill into its constituent parts, it promotes the 'technicalisation' of something which is actually not that difficult. Right now you may well be feeling that the organising of peer tutoring project is a great deal more difficult and complicated than you had first thought, and you might feel that you have gone off the idea.

Be reassured. Many of the potential problems mentioned above will never come to afflict you. Setting up your first peer tutoring project will undoubtedly be a great deal easier than you imagined. What we have tried to do here is cover all of the possible points of decision.

At many of these points, you can decide the item is irrelevant or decide 'No', and proceed carefully to organise a very simple project, which will probably be very successful. In this case, your completion of the Structured Planning Format (see Reproducibles) will be very brief, and the Format will have many blank spaces and be sprinkled with 'No' or 'Not Applicable'.

However, if your project should happen to be less successful than you would have liked, you will be able to review your decisions about organisation very easily, and determine where you might have gone wrong or left something out that might have been crucial. Thus, if you don't succeed first time, you will certainly succeed at the second attempt. Now at least you are prepared for anything. Well, almost anything.

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