Peer Assisted Learning Essay

Problem Statement Providing all students with an opportunity to grow academically and achieve needs to be every educator’s goal. Educators and educational leaders continue to search and explore for ways to help individualize instruction and to provide an environment where students have an active role in their learning (Starr, 2009). Peer assisted learning is a research-based strategy that promotes and helps active engagement for all learners in the classroom. Peer assisted learning or peer tutoring is not a revolutionary idea presented just recently in fact in the late 18th and 19th centuries two British educators developed similar approaches to peer tutoring even prior to the introduction of public schooling. In 1789, Andrew Bell became the superintendent for a school of orphans in Madras, India and developed a system in which Bell trained students to teach each other. Joseph Lancaster opened the Borough Road School in London, England in 1801 and this school involved the peer tutoring approach of learning. Each situation or instance resulted with a significant impact upon the educational practice. However, by the second half of the 19th century, enthusiasm and excitement for peer tutoring diminished, perhaps because of the start

Researchers, educators, and educational leaders respond to this criticism with various approaches to enhance and improve student achievement. Several studies look at the importance of an environment with student-to-student interaction in a peer-learning model. Johnson (1981) calls attention to the neglected variable in education with the student-to-student interaction. Johnson believed that many classrooms focus on the teacher-student relationships and interactions with learning and social development dependent upon these interactions, rather than the student-to-student