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(Document started on 14 Sep 2003.)
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PAL in the Psychology Department
(written by
Steve Draper)
This is a general home page for PAL (Peer Assisted Learning) in the psychology
department: designed equally for students, facilitators, staff, and interested
outsiders. (My notes on the
general idea
of PAL with links, papers etc. are elsewhere.
Pointers to
PAL elsewhere
in Glasgow University are also on a separate page.)
For information on PAL being currently offered to levels 1, 2, and 3
psychology classes see
the portal.
PAL related pages
- (Links from various department pages lead to this page, as do various web
addresses you might think of. Most memorable web
address for finding this page: pal.psy.gla.ac.uk)
- This page: a home page for PAL in psychology with relatively static
information about the scheme here.
- (My
page
on more of the theory and organisation behind PAL.)
Peer Assisted Learning (PAL) is the name we'll use for a scheme for organising
weekly group meetings for students on a given course, attended voluntarily but
officially recommended by the department, and led not by a staff member but by
a "facilitator" who is a student who has done the course previously. The
content discussed may be anything that seems relevant and important to the
groups, from administrative details through deeper implications of the course
material to study skills and any aspect of how to be a successful student.
Two insights underlie the scheme. The first is that students know what it was
like to do a course, and staff do not: they have something to pass on to
students in following years that cannot be obtained anywhere else. The second
is that peer interaction benefits learning (conceptual development) not only
because fellow students are 100 times more available than staff, but because the
explainer benefits even more than the listener: this is because to explain
something, you have to get it really clear in your own head, and nearly always
improve your own understanding in the process.
Or perhaps you prefer this view:
"The current search for new educational funnels must be reversed into the
search for their institutional inverse: educational webs which heighten the
opportunity for each one to transform each moment of his living into one of
learning, sharing, and caring."
[From the Introduction in (Illich; 1970):
Illich,Ivan D. (1970) Deschooling Society
(Calder & Boyars: London)]
For a brief discussion of contrasting schemes see
here,
and particularly peer mentoring.
A comfortable atmosphere in which they can pick up some help with the course
and enjoy it more. In the short term, it's a place they can get questions
answered (or at least find out where to find out the answers). In the medium
term, they'll probably end up little by little learning more, doing better,
and enjoying the course more. In the longer term, we hope they will acquire
metacognitive skills for monitoring and managing their own learning, and for
organising their own peer learning.
(More detail.)
In some other schemes, PAL has been targeted at courses with high failure
rates, and has
improved the pass rate.
If you want to attend PAL sessions, see the pages for the class (level) you
are in: the links were given near the top of this page.
Subject to exceeding maximum group sizes, we expect that any student may
attend any group as often or as seldom as they wish. We recommend attending
once per week. If you have a particular problem, go to a group and ask them
to help with it. However in general, you probably won't be able to predict in
advance what it is you'll get out of attending, and we believe the best thing
is to go regularly for a while and then review whether it has been worthwhile
for you. Not to give it a try is like refusing to speak to someone unless
they promise in advance to be your friend; not to take a waterproof until
after it has started raining; only to ask for a vaccination after you have
caught the disease.
- Knowing they are contributing significantly to other students' education.
- Acquiring, through training, practice, feedback, and reflection, some
important skills in leading groups.
They will receive a detailed letter of thanks from the university, which may
be used to support entries on their CV, and which describes the skills
acquired. (More detail.)
enjoyable. It is very suitable for those who like working in a supportive and
collaborative setting: facilitators normally work in pairs, and there are
also weekly meetings where facilitators share successes, problems, and
solutions with each other.
- No pay.
(Should facilitators be paid?)
- Enjoyment: most facilitators in similar schemes have found it very
enjoyable. It is very suitable for those who like working in a supportive and
collaborative setting: facilitators normally work in pairs, and there are
also weekly meetings where facilitators share successes, problems, and
solutions with each other.
If you want to be a facilitator, contact the PAL coordinators:
Judith Stevenson, for levels 1 and 2;
Steve Draper
for levels 3 and 4.
PAL can promote a number of aspects of learning and teaching which the
department would like to enhance (e.g. deep learning, and improving study
skills), but one of the most important to a department with very large classes
is improving how at home students feel by getting to know other students and
by feeling they can get help from a range of people and places. Helpful
interaction between different years is another thing the department is keen to
see improve. In many other schemes, PAL has been targeted at courses with
high failure rates, and has often
improved the pass rate.
The department also hopes this will prove a useful additional channel for
feedback from students to the department on how the courses are going: course
teams will be monitoring the public versions of what gets discussed in the
groups in order to see what seems to be going well, and what is causing
students problems.
For a longer discussion, see
this page,
but a short (if jargon-ridden) list might be:
- Supplemental instruction.
Any extra information from peers or facilitators can be helpful as an extra
learning resource.
- Any extra processing is likely to promote learning:
learning is strongly dependent on the time spent actually thinking about the
subject.
- Deep learning. Time spent discussing
the real meaning of the concepts in the course leads to "deep learning",
longer retention, and greater ability to use the concepts in different contexts.
- Social and academic "integration" (see
Tinto's model).
This refers to getting to know others, and still more to
feeling at home in the class, department, university, city, and in the role of
student.
- Mentoring.
The way a person new to a role (in this case the role of being a student on a
course) picks up unwritten skills about how to perform it successfully by
observing and interacting with a more experienced person (the mentor).
- Peer Assisted Learning: learning from and by discussing
issues with one's peers. This is probably even more use to the information
giver than to the receiver, because explaining requires reprocessing the
material. But it is also useful to the receiver, not least because
peers are 100 times more available than staff.
- The higher level aim of this ("auto-PAL") is to get students into the
habit of using peers and peer discussion
routinely in all future learning: a fundamental study skill.
- Reflection.
The practice of not just doing learning, but thinking about your learning
process: how well you are doing, how you go about learning, and whether your
methods and habits are being effective.
Attendance at PAL sessons is entirely voluntary, and information on who
attends is not normally available to staff. Attendance records are however
kept by the PAL coordinators to be used in these ways:
- The number attending each week is used to adjust the number and size of
groups to match demand and facilitator availability.
- At the end of the academic year, we will run a statistical analysis to see
whether (as has been found at some other universities) exam results are
significantly correlated with attendance at PAL. If we too find this, it will
be a strong argument for continuing PAL in this department.
- If we are able to run a more detailed evaluation of the scheme, then the
evaluator may access the records in order to ask some of those attending
whether they would be willing to be interviewed etc. She will not reveal
identities to anyone else.
The topics and content of what is discussed at each group (but not the
identities of the students concerned) will be reported by the facilitators and
shared publicly. This is so that everyone knows the topics that interest
students that week, and so other groups can also discuss them if they wish.
The major exception to this is if any participant is abusive of others in any
way: facilitators are required to report this, and the identity of the alleged
offender, immediately.
In contrast to confidentiality about (client) students attending PAL, we are
considering publishing facilitator names e.g. in case some students select the
groups they attend on the basis of facilitators they know. This issue will be
negotiated with facilitators.
If you have a problem with any aspect of this policy please raise it with us
(Judith Stevenson,
Steve Draper). We
are entirely open to changing the policy if that would better serve the aims
of the PAL scheme and the students it serves.
How the PAL groups feel to participants is very important to how well they
function, and how enjoyable they are. Each group will have to decide on its
own exact rules of conduct, and probably these will change quite often during
the year. Some may even formalise these into an explicit contract.
Here however are some basic expectations to serve as a starting point for
these agreements.
- A successful atmosphere would be one where participants feel comfortable
offering suggestions when they don't know whether they are right or not; and
also comfortable, when they wish, talking about their feelings as well as
facts about the course.
- Another important sign is a group where everyone talks a roughly equal
amount. Every participant can play an important role in promoting this.
- The atmosphere should be supportive and respectful of others'
contributions. This also means confidential: talking about individuals
outside the group without their permission is not appropriate.
Competitiveness, triumphalism, or contempt, are not helpful either. Being
respectful doesn't mean pretending to agree, but showing you think it is worth
saying what aspects you agree with and which you don't, and why.
- Facilitators are not there to answer questions, nor to help students with
their coursework. They are there to aid the process of students getting
answers and useful discussion from each other; and failing that, to suggest
where else information can best be found. The main exception to this is
answering questions about how it was to be a student on the course in their
experience.
General ideas about the agenda for each PAL session is discussed
here, and a generic agenda outlined.
Many detailed ideas (for facilitators) about how to plan and run plan PAL
sessions are here.
Newer general reflections on what makes for productive sessions are
here.
The set of documents used as handouts in the training session for Psychology
PAL facilitators on 25 Sept 2003 are available as a
combined pdf file.
They are not meant to make sense by themselves to others.
They include:
- Main dept.-specific briefing document: Steve Draper
- Encouraging participation: from the Bournemouth site
- Session Planning: Bournemouth? Fiona Black?
- Timing sheet: Fiona Black
- Difficult incidents: Fiona Black
- Workshop evaluation form: Bournemouth site
PAL coordinator:
The people coordinating the day to day and week to week running of the
scheme currently are
Judith Stevenson,
and
Steve Draper.
PAL promoter:
The academic promoting the adoption of PAL in psychology is
Steve Draper.
Getting pupils to teach each other goes back at least to Andrew Bell in the
eighteenth century. There are numerous ways students have been and are
organised to help each other. The literature on "peer tutoring" and "peer
assisted learning" in our university library (level 4, Education E29.p3)
describes some of these.
Our scheme derives more directly from an approach developed in the USA under
the name of Supplemental Instruction in 1973, and now offered at about 60% of
(research-oriented) US universities. It was introduced into the UK at
Kingston University in 1990 in modified form as PAL. (One way to find other
UK PAL sites is through the
PAL network.) In 2002-3, the
Student
Network introduced it to Glasgow University for a course in Computing
Science, supported by a grant from the Chancellor's fund. In 2003-4 the
psychology department decided to introduce it on a trial basis.
The scheme in psychology is not exactly the same, nor undertaken with exactly
the same set of priorities and aims, even as the scheme in computing science,
let alone those in other universities. Furthermore the name "peer assisted
learning" is used in the literature for a large range of different activities,
some quite different from this scheme. A more exact name for our scheme might
be "Mentor-assisted peer interaction and reflection", but this is less catchy,
doesn't acknowledge its connection with similar schemes, is harder to
understand, and so perhaps for most people is less clear.
There's a set of special email aliases for the groups of PAL facilitators.
This allows an easy way for me, or them, to email the whole group at once
without personally having each person's email. It is also used for posting a
report of each PAL meeting, both to inform each other, and to accumulate in an
archive of all email posts: this becomes a useful cumulative record, which
facilitators as well as I can consult.
Level 1 and Level 2: email to facilitators serving these years:
pal1@psy.gla.ac.uk
Level 3: email to facilitators serving this year:
pal3@psy.gla.ac.uk
Level 4: email to facilitators serving this year:
pal4@psy.gla.ac.uk
To join the relevant list if you have not already been added, either email me
personally or go to the relevant list web page and fill in the subscription
request there.
List of email lists
Example PAL email list page
For instructions on reading the email archives, subscribing, managing
your password etc. see here.
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