Wild Ideas - Student Teachers

All I ever learned about education, I learned from my kids. That's an oversimplification, but a useful oversimplification.

The 3-year-old wounded his lip, so the 7-year-old showed him an animated movie from the "Once Upon a Time ... Life" series, discussing the platelets and how they help fix wounds. The elder explained a few things to the younger. The elder got to practice teaching; She understood the issue better herself for having had to spell it out: It is a familiar experience - that explaining something to someone else improves our own understanding. Of course she also enjoyed the high status of knowing something - of being a teacher. BTW, did you notice the issue of a low status for teachers and teaching is not inborn but acquired? Young kids look up to those who teach them anything, and would like to be like those teachers. The young kid enjoyed learning, improved his esteem of his older sister. In general, the kids' relationship improved, and no grown-up had to be very active.

Everything worked out nicely. This is good news. The great news is that this sort of interaction is not a one-time accident. It has a name - "peer mentoring"; it is a natural way to transmit skills and knowledge; and it is scalable, and (this is where we are getting wild) it can be used to tackle directly the problem of class size, and the related problem of teacher attention.

In the extreme, it may be claimed that kids can teach themselves, as shown by Sugata Mitra's amazing discussion of the "hole in the wall." But even if we remain just wild but not extreme, and we build peer mentoring into the core of the schooling methodology - and not just as a curiosity - we may achieve a lot: A sense of empowerment to the mentor; Improved depth of understanding for the mentor; Practice of teaching (in real life we teach each other all the time); Much more personal attention concentrated on the learner (1:1 instead of 1:40); Freeing up the professional teacher to perform higher level tasks, such as directing the learning and observing individual learners and mentors.

The word "may" above is highlighted, to emphasize the fact that this is an idea - a claim - and not a fact. To establish the claim as a fact, we need research. That's a hassle, but the rewards may be great.