Peer Teaching as New Learning Experience in Computer Programming Education

Current education systems evolve around the concept of learning outcomes. Expected learning outcomes define the totality of information, knowledge, understanding, attitudes, values, skills, competencies, or behaviors a learner should master upon the completion of the curriculum. In this project, we focus on creating new learning experience by implementing peer teaching in a computer programming course.
In learning experience, students should be active and engage to achieve desired learning results. Peer teaching and learning is a method to achieve experience-based learning. This is because “to teach is to learn twice.” According to Jeff Atwood, co-founder of Stack Overflow, “Teaching peers is one of the best way to develop mastery.” We implement peer teaching in the Programming with Data Structures course in computer engineering department. The learning topics along with the learning objectives of each topic are distributed to students in the course. Students form a group of 2-3 persons and select a topic that they would prepare to teach their peers. For each week, the group who is supposed to teach their classmates on a particular topic has to prepare materials, teaching plan, exercises, and problem solving in lab assignments extensively with the instructors and teaching assistants. We also allow students to anonymously give feedbacks or comments on their peers for the teaching in each week.
There are a number of suggested benefits of peer teaching including the following: 1) students have more time for individualized learning, 2) direct interaction between students promotes active learning, 3) peer teachers reinforce their own learning by instructing others, 4) students feel more comfortable and open when interacting with their peers, 5) peers and students share a similar discourse, allowing for greater understanding,
As for our preliminary results for implementing peer teaching, we have witnessed the benefits numbers 2-5 mentioned above. Moreover, we have seen some outside-the-box thinking when peer teachers instructed their classmates with their own examples and understanding. Classmates also interacted better with their peer teachers while working on exercises (i.e. cooperative learning). It should be noted that as we have implemented this method, we have taken many precautions such as ensuring that peer teachers are well prepared and not interfering when peer teachers instruct in the classroom.
Thus, peer teaching can be viewed as yielding the promising results for students: team-working spirit and supportive relationships; greater psychological well-being, social competence, communication skills and self-esteem; and higher achievement towards learning outcomes.