To be considered as an expert teacher, you should reach a long way with your students so when they need help, their faces should be your clue to pause and scaffold them. But in many cases your help even if you revise and reshape it- is not enough for the student to get the information.
Here comes the role of a third partner other than you and the student. The peer tutoring might be the solution in this case.
It always happens that many students feel more comfortable in asking their classmates or even friends of similar age zone, to explain to them the misunderstood piece of knowledge. I did my research concerning the peer tutoring and its effect on the students achievement. I followed it up by a study on my own students.
the results where really enough to reveal that a student can help the other student understand the idea in the exact same way you wanted!
So yes, go for it and give your students the chance to seek help from " other than you " ... at the end we do want them to be independent learners
we know from ourselves as students if we didn't get an idea from the teacher, we directly ask our partner, what did she mean? and they will explain it in simple way, may our partner know better how to simplify it and the teacher didn't know how to put her self in the shoes of the students. beside so many students don't have the courage to ask the teacher, to prevent students' comments or criticizing. It's important to always seek for the best way to reach our students and to try different ways to be more fair!
ReplyDeleteTutoring is one effective way of helping low achievers to enhance their performance in different and amazing ways. Yet, in one class i observed student-student tutoring wasn't effective that much. Tutoring student should provide help but instead they were solving the exercises. So no benefit is for the low achievers.
ReplyDeleteYou are right, sometimes when students do not understand a concept or the content itself we as teachers should realize that sometimes using peer influence and interaction might be the solution. More than one time I have seen students ask their friends for a solution or an explanation even if the teacher has explained more than once.
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