Teachers! HOW to organise peer-to-peer learning in the classroom. This innovative method works!

Teachers: This is for you! Rob’s Learning Tree is a peer-to-peer teaching method especially developed for use in schools.
Have you ever wished you could clone yourself in the classroom? I have!
My story begins with a dilemma. At the start of the new school year, even after 44 years of teaching, I found myself stumped. When my grade 4 art classes came back to school for in-person learning after nearly two years of COVID lockdowns, I noticed during their first few weeks that their concentration levels, as a group, were scattered and unreliable. I was seeing a new phenomenon.
A post-COVID-lockdown phenomenon. 1-on-1 there was no problem, but in groups of 4, or 5, or more, they seemed all over the place when I was trying to introduce the lesson, demonstrate techniques with materials, explain equipment safety, share art tips, or explain learning goals.
What to do? In this video, find out what I did, and see how you too could use this simple and effective teaching method in your classroom.
PICTURE CREDITS:
Student artworks by students of classes 3 and 4 at The American Elementary School in Gdynia, Poland, during art lessons with Rob the Art Teacher.
SOUND:
This video uses the royalty-free background music “PerituneMaterial_Sakuya2” from www.chosic.com/
This video uses the sound effects “Sounds in a Forest” by Alexander, from OrangeFreeSounds, permitted for non-commercial use under license “Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)” orangefreesounds.com/sounds-i...
VIDEO:
This video uses free image stock video footage of a child on a swing by RODNAE Productions from www.pexels.com/ “pexels-rodnae-productions-8083155”
This video uses free image stock video footage of two children in a tree by RODNAE Productions from www.pexels.com/ “pexels-rodnae-productions-8083153”
This video uses free image stock video footage of a tree in sunlight “_DSC1080” from Videezy.com www.videezy.com/free-video/image
This video uses free image stock video footage of a bare tree by Ivan Khmelyuk from www.pexels.com/ “pexels-ivan-khmelyuk-10179999”
This video uses free image stock video footage of a fruit tree in sunlight by Jehuel Zelaya from www.pexels.com/ “production ID_4898728”
This video uses footage from education documentation video “Erasmus+ Mobility, Design Process & Creativity Workshop” (November 2021), by Eleni Magaliou.
THANKS:
Special thanks to Class 4 (2021-22) at The American Elementary School in Gdynia for collaborating in the first trials of "Rob's Learning Tree" and subsequent peer-to-peer teaching experiments.
Specjalne podziękowania dla klas 4 (2021-22) w Amerykańskiej Szkole Podstawowej w Gdyni za współpracę przy pierwszych próbach „Rob's Learning Tree” i późniejszych eksperymentach nauczania peer-to-peer.
If you enjoyed this video, be sure to like and share. If you’d like to see more content like this, please subscribe to my channel: / @robtheartteacher
Let me know what you think, in the comments above.
You can also find me on LinkedIn: / robgarrettcfa
Rob Garrett is an accomplished art teacher, writer, and curator. With fine art and art history degrees from leading New Zealand Universities, he is a qualified teacher with experience teaching art to all ages, having worked in primary (elementary) schools, high schools, and higher education art schools (academies), including a time as the Head of New Zealand’s oldest art school, in Dunedin. His public service includes periods as a senior manager of arts development and as a Council member (governance) with New Zealand’s arts council. His international work with artists has included directing and establishing artist residency programmes, managing New Zealand’s presence at the 2005 Venice Biennale of Contemporary Art, and curating numerous public art exhibitions, festivals, and city-wide programs.

[@saratlachac2740]

What do the students do while they are “waiting” to be taught? That seems like that would be a problem in my classroom.

[@RobtheArtTeacher]

Thank you, Sara. This is such an important question. When I am deciding whether to use the Learning Tree during a lesson (because I do not always use it), the question of what the students will be productively doing that is an authentic part of the project, while they 'wait' to be taught peer-to-peer is a very important consideration. So, what I do is look at my lesson and identify what they can be starting on that is easy to introduce because of their prior learning, so that they are in fact busy with the project from the get-go. Also, as explained in the video, the peer-to-peer learning is limited to aspects of the whole lesson - only those micro-lessons within the lesson that can be taught in this way.
So, as an example, what I did with the masks project illustrated in the video was this: Using a very quick verbal and chalkboard (words and sketches) introduction, I set the students three tasks 'creative' tasks:
1) Because the classes had already learned how we use sketching as a quick visual brainstorming technique, I challenged them to create several A4-sized pages of sketches of themed mask shapes (big outline shapes and surface patterns) - fire masks, water masks, leaf/tree masks, loosely playing with a 'mid-Winter Festival' theme. 2) After creating these sketches they were to select the one they liked best and bring it to me to show me and briefly tell me about it before being given the OK to go to the next step...
3) To think about and decide what the dominant colour of their mask might be, and what the other colours might be, and to check that they had (or could find in the classroom bag of scraps) sufficient amounts of those colours for a mask that would be about the size of two A3-sized sheets of craft paper joined together. Then start marking out the outline of their mask on the card in preparation for cutting it.
In that situation, the students were working on their own creative expression tasks while they were waiting for the technical peer-to-peer aspects, so they didn't actually feel as if they were 'waiting' at all... My rule-of-thumb is to split the activities into a) creative aspects that can be quickly introduced so that students get underway with the project, and b) technical micro-lessons within the lesson that can be taught using peer-to-peer learning. Not all lessons are suitable.
What I have observed with my class over time, is that using the peer-to-peer methods as one of the learning strategies has contributed to the class as a whole being 'easier' to teach. So it seems to have helped the group dynamic in class develop and mature.