Lauren Hays
Abstract
My students engage in synchronous peer teaching in my online asynchronous class, by meeting on a platform such as Zoom with a classmate partner, recording their meeting, and sending the recording to me.
I teach an asynchronous online graduate course, Assessing and Evaluating Online Instruction. Most of the students who take this course are practicing teachers. Grades the class’s students teach range from Pre-K through post-secondary. For one of the course’s assignments, students are required to create a presentation about an online technology tool they use for assessment of their students.
The assignment aligns with two course objectives:
Evaluate the effectiveness of online assessment instruments in promoting learning.
Demonstrate methods for using evaluation to improve instruction.
Original Assignment
Originally, with Google Slides or PowerPoint, students were required to create a presentation in which they discussed and demonstrated an online assessment instrument. Students then sent their presentation to me, on our online course platform. I found students’ discussions of their chosen assessment tool lacking sufficient evaluation of the tool. Additionally, while I encouraged students to share their presentations on our Discussion Board so that others might learn from the presentations, many students did not. Often I was the only audience member. The original assignment did not tap the potential of the students’ presentations, to advance their classmates’ learning.
Synchronous Peer Teaching
I decided to implement a peer teaching activity to further students’ learning and increase their motivation to engage in evaluation of the assessment instrument they present. As Stigmar (2016) asserts, peer teaching can be an effective learning strategy. Peer-to-peer dialogue enhances students’ understanding (Schillings et al., 2020), and peer teaching increases student engagement by using active learning (Jahnke & Lindgren, 2021). Though Farros et al. (2020) conclude that including a synchronous component in an asynchronous course might not be worth the extra time the instructor needs to spend, for my course’s synchronous peer teaching assignment there is no extra time for me, as the pairs of students meet on their own.
Knowing that during the pandemic my students used synchronous virtual meeting software such as Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams, to teach their students and meet with colleagues, the coaching assignment requires the coaching partners to meet synchronously, using a virtual platform. All coaching pairs have chosen Zoom as the platform for their synchronous sharing. The coaching partners are required to record their coaching sessions and share the recording with me.
In the revised peer teaching assignment, as in the original assignment, students prepare a slide show about an assessment tool with which they assess their students and share their presentation with me. However, now, my students present, evaluate, and teach a classmate how to use the assessment tool.The coaching partner asks follow-up questions about the presenter’s tool. The students then, together, evaluate the instrument’s efficacy. Finally, the partners switch roles.
Assignment Instructions
Select a digital assessment tool that you use regularly and teach one of your classmates how to use the tool. Peer teaching can be done via Zoom or other video conferencing software to which you have access.
In teaching your partner include:
1. How to use the tool
2. In what educational settings you use the tool (e.g. formative, summative, assessment, evaluation)
3. What data the tool helps you gather
4. How you use the data
5. Use screen sharing to ensure elements of the assessment instrument can be clearly viewed, as they are presented.
– With your partner, evaluate the assessment instrument.
Record your coaching session.
Since students may not feel comfortable being recorded, I provide an option for a reflection paper that includes the questions each partner posed and how the instrument was ultimately evaluated. To ensure a synchronous session, I ask students to submit a short recording of the peer teaching introduction, even if they are not comfortable being recorded and are selecting the option of submitting a paper.
Examples of online assessment tools students choose to share are: Kahoot! which the graduate students use to assess their students’ content knowledge; Nearpod, which the students use to assess their students’ content knowledge; Google Jamboard (which will no longer be available after December 31, 2024), as a formative assessment, to elicit questions students still have, and IXL, to assess math content knowledge.
Assignment Evaluation
A grading rubric (shown in Table 1) is used in my assessment of students’ work. Percentage distributions for elements assessed in grading are: Appropriate Tool 10%, Presentation’s Content 40%, Meeting’s Technical Clarity 30%, Peers’ Evaluation of Tool Discussion 20%.
Table 1
Grading Rubric
Assignment Considerations
In planning the peer teaching assignment, I take the following into consideration:
What technology students can use to engage in peer teaching. I have to consider what students have access to from the University or personally from their places of employment. This includes both virtual meeting software and recording software.
What recording features are available with peer meeting tools. For example, Google Meet is a tool provided by the University, but it no longer has a recording feature. Due to this, I suggest students use another screencasting tool such as ScreenPal (formerly Screencast-o-matic) to record Google Meet.
Students can create a free account with Zoom or other products, and Panopto is provided by our university. Students might have access to a work issued recording account.
To support students, I offer the opportunity to test their meeting software with me, during my office hours. In addition, students can plan a dry-run of their presentation with their partner, and invite me to give feedback.
Future Enhancements
During and after the revised peer teaching assignment’s first implementation, I kept notes of things to do differently in the future:
Plan assignment a few weeks into the semester so that the class attendance roster is finalized.
Set up partners in groups, in the learning management system.
Email partners and introduce them to each other.
Be willing to make adjustments for partners that do not have the same schedules. For example, allow students to each film their own teaching.Then require students to watch their partner’s video and write questions about the efficacy of the instrument after viewing the video. Students would then share the questions with their partner, and the partner responds in a follow-up video, with the answers to the questions.
Create a guide that shows students how they can upload their recording to YouTube as a private video, and how to submit a link to their recording, as file size might be too big to submit the video directly into the learning management system.
Give students a tip sheet for how to check audio quality, video quality, and how to perform a test recording.
In the future, instead of random partner assignments, I will select pairs based on common places of employment (i.e. elementary, secondary, post-secondary).
Additional Reflections
I plan to use this assignment again, the next time I teach the class. From watching the recordings, it is apparent that students were engaged. Course objectives were fulfilled: students demonstrated their methods for using evaluation to improve instruction and through the discussion evaluated the effectiveness of online assessment instruments in promoting learning. Students strengthen communications and collaboration abilities.
Students ask each other meaningful questions, which lead to deep discussion about the efficacy of the tools. Some students indicate they would change assessment instruments because they realize the one they were using was not as robust as the one their partner shared.
With the pandemic now over, the course assignment will not be substantially changed, as online assessment tools are still important. My students use online tools to assess their students’ progress. Many assignments my students provide their students are conducted online and submitted online in a learning management system. Teachers and students gather data through digital tools. Additionally, online tools make formative assessment quick, and teachers can see the results immediately to know if they need to re-teach a concept. Online tools also allow for easier analysis of assessment results’ patterns, to discern where a class may be struggling. Many schools have virtual learning days, when there is a storm day.
Another benefit of the synchronous peer teaching assignment is that students appear to enjoy talking to each other, in real time. I am surprised at the amount of casual conversation that is recorded and submitted. Students share about their lives and teaching experiences before and after the official assignment. From this observation, I believe the assignment helps to build community, which is something I am always striving to foster in primarily asynchronous online courses.
References
Farros, J. N., Shawler, L. A., Gatzunis, K. S., & Weiss, M. J. (2020). The effect of synchronous discussion
sessions in an asynchronous course. Journal of Behavioral Education, 1-13.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10864-020-09421-2
Jahnke, K., & Lindgren, S. (2021, July), You Teach Us: Peer Teaching in the Engineering Classroom
Paper presented at 2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access, Virtual Conference.
https://peer.asee.org/38226.
Schillings, M., Roebertsen, H., Savelberg, H., Whittingham, J., & Dolmans, D. (2020). Peer-to-peer
dialogue about teachers’ written feedback enhances students’ understanding on how to improve
writing skills. Educational Studies,46(6), 693-707.
Stigmar, M. (2016). Peer-to-peer teaching in higher education: A critical literature review. Mentoring &
Tutoring: partnership in learning, 24(2), 124-136.
Lauren Hays, PhD is Associate Professor of Instructional Technology at the University of Central Missouri, Warrensburg, Missouri. Dr. Hays can be reached at lauhays@ucmo.edu.