JOURNAL OF APPLIED DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY 5, 331-343 (1984)

The Peer Education: Untapped Potential*

WILLIAM DAMON

Clark Universiry

The purpose of this paper is to provide o rotionole for moking broader educational use of peer leorning principles OS explicated in developmental theory ond research.

The paper orgues that peer learning brings with it unique motivational and cognitive benefits for participating peers. Research has shown that peer leoming can bolster children’s self-esteem, awaken their interest in challenging tasks, enhance scholarly achievement, and foster prosocial behavior. In particular, it is on effective means of enablin children to grasp basic concepts that underlie school curricula. Two dr erent forms of peer learning, “peer tutoring” and “peer collaboration,” are f7 distinguished. Each has its potential use: peer tutoring for transmitting information and drilling special skills; peer collaboration for facilitating intellectual discovery and the acquisition of basic knowledge. Some general guidelines for the integration of peer tutoring ond peer collaboration in the classroom are offered. It is recognized thot specific curriculum plans imple- menting these guidelines must be formulated with a view to the overall cultural context of the school system. Such plans must be molded in context to suit the needs of each particular site. It is concluded, however, that the general principles of peer education set forth in this position paper would enhance all varieties of schooling. As explicated in this article, peer education complements rather than supplants adult teaching, freeing up teachers’ time and attention and enabling them to focus more directly and effectively on individual children’s learning needs.

Over the past two decades, psychological and educational research has established beyond doubt that children can have a powerful influence upon one another’s intellectual development. Some of this research even has suggested that certain educational material may be more readily grasped through peer interchange than through traditional adult-child instruction. This may come as a surprise to adults accustomed to thinking of peer influence as at best a distraction from learning and at worst an inducement to antisocial attitudes and activity.

The recent interest in peer-based learning has arisen from a number of con- verging trends within psychology and education. Interestingly, several quite distinct (and often opposing) theoretical traditions have found agreement on this issue, albeit for different reasons. Cognitive-developmental psychologists in the tradition of Piaget look to peer interaction as a means of providing children with uniquely

*Preparation of this position paper was undertaken on the initiative of the advisory committee of the Van Leer Fund and with the Fund’s financial support. The paper has benefited greatly from the advice of Allen Black, Daniel Hart, Melanie Killen, Elliot Turiel, Oscar Van Leer, and James Youniss. The collaborative research and editing efforts of Anne Colby are also gratefully acknowledged. Correspon- dence and requests for reprints should be sent to William Damon at the Department of Psychology, Clark University, 950 Main Street, Worcester, MA 01610.

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constructive feedback. Soviet psychologists in the tradition of Vygotsky value the special thought processes engendered by peer communication. The psychiatric movement initiated by Harry Stack Sullivan focuses on the importance of early peer relations to a child’s future mental health. And educators experimenting with peer tutoring in the schools have discovered the instructional benefits of peer interaction for the tutor as well as the tutee.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a rationale for introducing principles of peer learning into school settings. This is therefore a “position paper” advocating a peer-based approach to education. The paper also specifies the particular benefits of peer learning in its various forms. Finally, it suggests some general principles for implementing peer-based instruction in the classroom.

THREE THEORETICAL VIEWS ON THE BENEFITS OF PEER INTERACTION

One sure sign of a robust phenomenon in any science is when there is concurrence among theorists who normally disagree about almost everything else. This is the case with most contemporary developmental theories on the matter of peer interac- tion and its importance to the growing child.

There have been three theoretical traditions that have heralded in particular the importance of peers for children’s development. These are the traditions that follow from the work of Jean Piaget, Lev Vygotsky, and Harry Stack Sullivan. Although there is much overlap in what these theories say about children’s peer relations, there are also some differences in how each theory conceives of the mechanisms by which peer interaction exerts its influence. We shall briefly review here these three views on how peer interaction contributes to a child’s intellectual and social development.

From the writings of Piaget and his followers emerges the view that peer interaction prods development by posing critical cognitive conflicts (F. B. Murray, 1968, 1972; J. Murray, 1974; Perret-Clermont, 1980; Piaget, 1932/1965; Smeds- lund, 1966; Strauss, 1972). A cognitive conflict is a perceived sense of contradic- tion between what the child believes and what the world is telling the child. If the child becomes aware of such a contradiction, the experience has a disequilibrating (or perturbing) effect on the child, instigating the child to question his or her beliefs and to try out new ones. Cognitive conflict, therefore, is a catalyst for change. It motivates children to reassess their old conceptions of the world and to construct new ones that fit better with the feedback that they are receiving.

For a number of reasons, a child’s peers often act as a particularly compelling source of cognitive conflict. First, children speak to one another on a level that they can easily understand. Second, they speak directly to one another, without hedging words. Third, they take the feedback of another child seriously and are strongly motivated to reconcile contradictions between themselves and other children. Fourth, informational communications between children often are less emotionally threatening than corrective advice from an adult.

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Piaget wrote that peers forced one another to “decenter” by taking the per- spective of the other. When children disagree with one another, they encounter both a social and a cognitive conflict. This experience leads children to a number of important realizations. First, they become aware that there are points of view other than their own. Second, they learn to examine their own point of view and to reassess its validity. Third, they learn that they must justify their own point of view and communicate it thoroughly to others if others are to accept it as valid. This in turn forces them to work out their understanding of the issue at hand so that they are able to express their views clearly and convincingly.

Thus, according to Piaget, children gain both social and cognitive benefits from peer interaction. The social benefits are their improved communication skills and their sharper sense of other persons’ perspectives. The cognitive benefits are the urge to reexamine the truth of one’s own conceptions and the guidance of another’s feedback in this process. Piaget believed that these social and cognitive benefits were directly related, in that improved social communication instigates progressive cognitive change. When people communicate well with one another, they realize the need to explain and justify their beliefs, which in turn forces them to rationalize their beliefs as much as possible. Thus, a sense of social responsibility in reasoning leads ultimately to improvements in the logical quality of one’s ideas.

In Piagetian theory, peer interaction works mostly as a trigger for change: It does not provide the substance or the “stuff” of change. Piaget believed that the perturbing feedback provided by peer interaction initiates a process of intellectual reconstruction in the child. But once this process has begun, according to Piaget’s theory, the main work of formulating new knowledge is done by the individual, in solitary reflection, by symbolically manipulating the world and making inferences on the basis of these symbolic manipulations. The ideas themselves remain the product of the child’s internal reasoning processes.

The other two theoretical perspectives portray a broader and even more de- cisive role for peer interaction in development. According to these theories, peer feedback not only initiates change, it also shapes the nature of change itself.

The Vygotskian tradition (Vygotsky, 1962, 1978), still flourishing both in Soviet and American psychology (Leontiev & Luria, 1968; Rogoff & Wertsch, 1984; Wertsch, 1981), makes very strong claims about what children can learn from peer encounters. According to this view, peers benefit from one another by inter- nalizing the cognitive processes implicit in their interactions and communications.

In other words, children are introduced to new patterns of thought when they engage in dialogues with peers. This is because peer dialogue is by nature a cooper- ative exchange of ideas between equals and therefore emulates several critical features of rational thinking. In particular, the verification of ideas, the planning of strategies in advance, and the symbolic representation of intellectual acts are enact- ed through peer communication. Eventually, after repeated exposure to cooperative peer exchange, the child’s own thinking becomes influenced. That is, the child takes on or “internalizes” the very communicative procedures that the child experi-

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ences when interacting with a peer. In this manner, the child’s intellectual abilities are permanently modified for the better.

Further, a peer encounter can present to its participants strategies that are specifically appropriate for solving cognitive tasks. In the math and science area, for example, peer communication can help children master deductive and com- binatorial reasoning (Forman, 1981). These skills are necessary for virtually all advanced scientific thinking. Such reasoning skills follow from peer communica- tions in which new solutions are generated collaboratively by peers and then are mutually discussed, tried out, and corrected. Complementary roles assumed by peer collaborators are internalized by the children in the course of the communication, thus enhancing the power and scope of the individual children’s problem-solving capacities. If this Vygotskian interpretation is correct, the developmental benefits of peer collaboration are profound indeed, directly influencing both general and spe- cific features of children’s intellectual processes.

The third view of why peer interaction is educationally effective stems from the psychiatric writings of Sullivan and his recent followers (Sullivan, 1953; Youniss, 1980). This perspective stresses the “coconstruction” of ideas that occurs during peer exchange. Peers approach one another as equals and work out concepts through the cogeneration and consensual validation of intellectual strategies. They learn from one another not by copying or adopting the other’s competence (as in a tutorial situation with an adult), but by mutually devising plans together in a collab- orative effort. Peers benefit from one another because they share ideas, seek con- sensus, compromise willingly with one another, and remain open to new insights generated in a peer dialogue.

One implication of this third position is that peer relations introduce children to collaboration as a mode of social interaction. Collaboration is only possible in an atmosphere of mutual respect: Piaget (1932/ 1965) also stressed this in his moral judgment writings. Because peers are closely matched in knowledge and ability and because there is no authority relation between them, they take one another se- riously. This enables them to pool their efforts in order to arrive at a solution that wins their confidence.

Collaboration means an active give-and-take of ideas between persons rather than one person’s passively learning from the other. Collaborative learning experi- ences are ones in which participants discover solutions and create knowledge to- gether. As such, collaboration has several educational advantages. It encourages participants to engage in “discovery” learning, a strongly motivated learning pro- cess especially appropriate for grasping basic concepts. It also enables children to explore new possibilities jointly, limited only by the boundaries of their mutual imaginations. The child is not constrained by an expert who ‘knows better” during a genuinely collaborative interaction.

Finally, in a social-relational sense, collaboration enhances each party’s re- spect for the other’s prerogatives and perspectives. It is for this reason that Sullivan and Youniss, in agreement with Piaget, link peer collaboration to the development of empathy, kindness, and a sense of justice. Conversely, as Youniss points out,

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collaboration may not serve all social-relational purposes. The unilateral respect that a child must acquire for the social order per se may be established most easily in the authoritative context of adult-child interactions.

SUMMARY OF THEORETICAL POSITIONS

Each of the three theories discussed above is enthusiastic about the educational benefits of peer interaction, although the theories differ somewhat in their view on how peer interaction contributes to development. The Piagetian view stresses the socio-cognitive conflicts generated in peer discourse and debate. The Vygotskian view stresses the internalization of intellectual processes like verification, spon- taneous generation, and criticism, all of which flourish during peer communica- tions. The Sullivanian view, aligned partially (but in different ways) with both Piaget’s and Vygotsky’s views, stresses the coconstruction of new ideas that occurs during peer collaboration.

The differences between the theories need not be seen as contrasts, but rather as complementary emphases. Each of the theories has its own message about how peer interaction may be used to aid the eduational process. When combined, the three theoretical positions provide a conceptual.foundation for a peer-based plan of education. From the three theories taken together, the following messages emerge:

1. Through mutual feedback and debate, peers motivate one another to abandon misconceptions and search for better solutions.

2. The experience of peer communication can help a child master social processes, such as participation and argumentation, and cognitive processes, such as ver- ification and criticism.

3. Collaboration between peers can provide a forum for discovery learning and can encourage creative thinking.

4. Peer interaction can introduce children to the process of generating ideas and solutions with equals in an atmosphere of mutual respect. This in turn can foster an orientation toward kindness and fairness in interpersonal relationships.

5. However great its educational potential, peer interaction does not best serve all developmental purposes. For example, teaching children the realities of the status quo and respect for the social order is done most naturally in the context of the adult-child relation.

These conclusions derive from prominent theoretical traditions in develop- mental psychology; but it should be noted that they are shared by other social science disciplines as well. The urban sociologist Jane Jacobs, for example, has discussed the growth of cities in very similar terms (Jacobs, 1984). She writes that undeveloped cities mature best when they trade with one another rather than with more advanced urban societies. When dealing with “peers, ’ ’ undeveloped cities are forced to produce for themselves the technological and communicational capacities necessary for full progress. Thus, the principles of “discovery learning” through peer interchange apply at the level of societal as well as individual development.

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RESEARCH IN EDUCATIONAL SETTINGS

The theoretical accounts cited above identify the potential benefits of peer-based educational experiences. But it is impossible to foresee how new techniques will work in actual educational settings until they are tried out. Fortunately, we now have about two decades’ worth of empirical research to help us gauge the merits of a peer-based instructional approach. Some of this research comes from experimental attempts to introduce peer teaching in the schools, and some from psychological efforts to test and expand the theoretical writings of Piaget, Vygotsky, Sullivan, and their followers.

From a Piagetian perspective, the most systematic research on peer interaction and its developmental benefits has come from the work of Willem Doise and his collaborators in Geneva (Doise & Mugny, 1979; Doise, Mugny, & Perret-Cler- mont, 1976; Mugny & Doise, 1976). Doise holds the Piagetian assumption that social interactions that generate conflict are the ones most effective in triggering cognitive change. In his studies, Doise compares the cognitive performances of children working alone with the performances of children working in social interac- tion with other children. On a typical problem in spatial relations, Doise reports that “two children, working together, can successfully perform a task involving spatial coordinations; children of the same age, working alone, are not capable of per- forming the task” (Doise et al., 1976, p. 367). Even more interesting were Doise’s findings from a standard conservation-of-quantity task. “Subjects who did not possess certain cognitive operations. . . acquire these operations after having actu- alized them in a social coordination task” (Doise et al., 1976, p. 367). This indicates that children in social interaction with one another restructure their cog- nitive performances as they coordinate ideas with their peers. Such restructuring directly improves the reasoning abilities of the participating children.

Doise’s experiments demonstrate that progress by children working together is achieved through the act of coordinating perspectives and ideas, rather than through the transmission of information from one child to another. The key mecha- nism of change, therefore, is social coordination rather than imitation. Empirically, Doise has been able to support this assertion with some striking findings. In one critical study, Doise found that children’s collective performances were superior to those of group members taken individually both in cases where children were paired with peers more advanced and less advanced than themselves (Mugny & Doise, 1976). Thus, progress was not so much a result of imitating another with superior knowledge as it was a result of coordinating one’s approach with another.

Interestingly, in this and other studies Doise found that “more progress takes place when children with different cognitive strategies work together than when children with the same strategies do so” (Mugny & Doise, 1976, p. 190). This is even true in cases where both children’s initial strategies are .incorrect (Doise & Mugny, 1979). This means that in order to have a significant effect, the act of social coordination with peers must require a child to alter his or her old way of solving the problem at hand. In other words, the most developmentally beneficial interactions

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are those in which a conflict of ideas is embedded in a context of peer cooperation. This is, of course, a very Piagetian message. More recently, the work of Perret- Clermont (1980) has replicated and extended Doise’s approach in a number of math and science learning areas.

In a similar vein, some American psychologists have successfully used peer interaction techniques to teach children a range of Piagetian concepts. These studies generally focus on the acquisition of conservation, which Piaget saw as central to the development of childhood intelligence. Conservation has often proven resistant to training. Nevertheless, developmental psychologists have found methods of help- ing children learn the basic reasoning skills necessary for conservation. Among the most effective of these methods is asking children to work jointly with their peers on solving a conservation problem. Several conservation studies have shown that peer collaboration can facilitate children’s acquisition of conservation in the areas of length, number, and mass (Ames & F. B. Murray, 1982; Botvin & F. B. Murray, 1975; Miller & Brownell, 1975; F. B. Murray, 1968, 1972; J. Murray, 1974;

Silverman & Geiringer, 1973; Silverman & Stone, 1972). More directly in the educational research tradition, Robert Slavin has studied

the effect of “cooperative learning” on children’s school progress (Slavin, 1983). Slavin’s approach is to have four or five children work together on typical problems drawn from school curricula. These problems are segmented into different compo- nents so that the children must take complementary roles in working toward an overall solution. Slavin finds that his cooperative learning paradigm yields a number of educational benefits for the participating children. Some of these benefits are motivational: The children’s attentiveness to the tasks at hand are significantly improved by their peer engagements. Most importantly, cooperative learning en- hances children’s understanding of the basic concepts underlying the presented material. Thus, cooperative learning enables children not only to acquire specific competence, such as expertise in using a math formula, but also to grasp the logical rationale behind the formula. When children work together on a task, they often examine the fundamental principles for solving the task. In this manner, peer learning facilitates the discovery of basic concepts.

Slavin also believes that providing children with extrinsic incentives as part of the group learning situation is critical to their enhanced achievement. Although he presents some evidence showing that short-term gains are indeed greater when extrinsic reward is provided, there is no reason to believe that long-term progress is affected by such reward. The learning literature does not confirm the long-term effectiveness of external inducements upon children’s school progress, and there is no compelling reason to believe that such inducements are an important ingredient in peer learning. Consequently, I have not emphasized this aspect of Slavin’s otherwise impressive research program.

Finally, one recent developmental study is particularly interesting because it goes beyond demonstrating that peer interaction can be an effective learning device and provides insights into the conditions that maximize its effectiveness. Bearison, Magzamen, and Filardo (1984) observed children aged 5 to 7 working collab-

oratively on one of Doise’s spatial perspective tasks. These investigators found a curvilinear relationship between the amount of conflict in these collaboration groups and progressive change. In other words, the groups in which children debated moderately with one another about how to solve the task were those in which children tended to learn the most. Groups in which children debated too stren- uously, or not strenuously enough, tended to learn relatively little. Maximum pro- gress was found when all the children in a group participated in the debates. Finally, optimal progress took place when children supplied verbal explanations and justifi- cations for their intellectual disagreements, rather than merely expressing conflict with one another and leaving it at that.

PEER COLLABORATION VERSUS PEER TUTORING: CONTRASTING TECHNIQUES

All of the studies cited above have one thing in common: They rely on the interac- tion of children who are all relative novices. Through experimentation, discussion, argumentation, and debate, these children together work out solutions to difficult problems. In the process, they motivate one another to acquire new knowledge and generate the constructive feedback that enables them to improve their reasoning abilities. The developmental mechanisms postulated by the three theoretical posi- tions summarized above explain how and why children’s intellectual growth occurs in the course of such peer interactions.

There is, however, another way of using peer interaction for educational purposes, although this way calls for a less peer-like relation between the participat- ing children. This method is the peer tutoring approach, in which one child plays the role of the expert and the other child plays the role of the novice. The first child teaches the second child, much as an adult teacher would. It is necessary, of course, for the first child to have some competence or information that the second child lacks. For this reason, peer tutoring usually occurs between an older and a younger child (usually 2 or 3 years apart) or between a bright and an educationally disadvan- taged child.

Peer tutoring is the model advocated by Vygotsky in his own educational writings. Vygotsky suggested that “problem solving in collaboration with more capable peers” enables children to enter into new areas of potential (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 86). Vygotsky called these areas of potential the “zone of proximal development, ” indicating that they are the leading edge of the child’s intellectual growth. In Vygotsky’s view, collaborating children construct knowledge together while interacting, with the more experienced child guiding the direction of the interaction. In the process, as discussed in the theoretical section above, both parties benefit by internalizing the intellectual processes experienced during the discourse.

It is the peer tutoring approach that has most often been tried by educational researchers working in actual school settings. A host of studies in the 1970s found that peer tutoring can spur the educational progress of both tutor and tutee. As an experimental technique in alternative forms of schooling, peer tutoring has proven surprisingly effective (Allen, 1976; Bloom, 1976).

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There are a number of lessons that we have learned from these recent experi- ments in peer tutoring. Most importantly, we know that it is a workable, cost- effective means of providing students with supplementary instructional services. It works best when it is carried out over a long period of time and when the tutors are carefully trained and supervised (Hartup, 1983). Under these favorable conditions, peer tutoring has been shown to aid children’s acquisition of both verbal and quantitative skills (East, 1976; Guarnaccia, 1973). Further, specific curriculum

topics in substantive areas like history or physics can be successfully mastered through peer tutoring techniques (Mollod, 1970; Rogers, 1969). Finally, peer tutor- ing can also yield personal benefits for both tutor and tutee. Children’s self-esteem, attitudes toward schooling, and social adjustment all improve during peer tutoring participation, whether as tutor or tutee (Allen, 1976). One investigator (Staub, 1975) found that peer tutoring even increased children’s inclinations to act charita- bly toward the needy.

Because peer tutoring is of demonstrable value both to tutor and tutee, an ideal schooling approach would expose children to both roles. Any child has an area of competence that can be imparted to a younger or less sophisticated child. Con- versely, all children can benefit from tutoring in areas in which they are relative novices. In assuming both tutor and tutee roles, children not only gain the benefits of tutee as well as tutor, but also a highly informative experience in role reversal. The child’s switching from expert to novice can impart to the child a deeper and more sympathetic understanding of the educational endeavor.

Because there are several key contrasts between the peer tutoring and collab- oration approaches, we naturally are led to ask which is more educationally bene- ficial. The answer is that each seems to serve a valuable, though distinct, purpose. Both arrangements contribute importantly to a child’s personal and social growth, and the two are certainly compatible with one another. An ideal peer-based instruc- tional program would combine the two.

Peer tutoring is most appropriate in situations where there is a need for supplementary bolstering of adult instruction. Children can impart competence to other children and benefit from the experience as well. Peer tutoring, therefore, is an excellent way for children to exchange skills and information. On the other hand, the acquisition of basic reasoning skills occurs best in a collaborative rather than a tutoring relationship, as has been established by two studies that directly compared the two approaches (Sharan, 1984; Slavin, 1980). Genuine collaboration, therefore, fosters the all-important acquisition of basic thinking skills.

CONCLUSIONS: FORMULATING A PEER-BASED EDUCATIONAL PLAN

There are many reasons that favor peer-based instruction in the schools. This review has suggested several:

1. The collaborative forms of peer exchange can foster discovery learning of basic

concepts.

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2. Peer learning can help underachieving groups of children overcome their moti- vational deficits.

3. Peer instruction favors children’s personal growth by improving their attitudes toward others, enhancing their self-esteem, and providing them with construc- tive social experiences.

4. In a practical sense, peer tutoring can offer an effective, low-cost supplement to adult teaching.

5. It can aid teachers’ efforts to provide individualized learning experiences for their students.

In order to introduce peer-based education to a school system, a number of guidelines should be followed. First, subject matter that can be taught through peer tutoring should be distinguished from subject matter more effectively conveyed by a peer collaboration approach. This distinction between the uses of peer tutoring and peer collaboration should be made along the following lines:

Peer tutoring may be used whenever students need to acquire information or skills that do not extend beyond their conceptual reach. Learning historical facts, practicing word attack skills, becoming adept at multiplication tables, even figuring out how to make use of a computer, all can be taught through peer tutoring. This is because these exercises draw upon features of basic understanding that the child has already developed. Having an expert child work with a novice child is an effective, stimulating way of imparting these skills and information to the novice child. In the process, the expert child also benefits significantly from the experience, both by gaining additional mastery over the material and by acquiring a new sense of personal competence.

Peer collaboration, on the other hand, should be used to foster the learning of basic concepts. It is an ideal technique for encouraging children to wrestle with intellectual challenges and difficult new principles. Learning to communicate accu- rately through written and spoken language, grasping the logic behind scientific formulas, and realizing the political rationale underlying a societal governance system can all be fostered in a collaborative peer interaction context. Such intellec- tual accomplishments stretch the boundaries of children’s mental abilities. Conse- quently, they flourish best under conditions of highly motivated discovery, the free exchang:: of ideas, and reciprocal feedback between mutually respected equals. These are precisely the characteristics of collaborative interchanges between children.

With regard to the proper use of both peer tutoring and peer collaboration, a number of principles have emerged from the educational and psychological research findings reviewed in this paper:

1. Where peer tutoring is used, tutors should be well trained in communication techniques as well as in the subject matter being conveyed.

2. Peer tutors should be supervised regularly by adult teachers. 3. Unless special circumstances dictate differently, peer tutors should be 2 to 3

years older than the children whom they teach.

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4. All children should be encouraged to assume both the role of tutor (where they have a special competence) and the role of tutee (where they can benefit from extra instruction).

5. Peer tutoring should be done on a one-to-one basis. 6. The same tutor and tutee should be paired together over a sustained period of

time so that a personal relationship can develop between them. 7. Where peer collaboration is used, children should be of approximately the same

ages and intellectual abilities. 8. Collaboration groups may vary in size from two to four children. 9. Groups should be kept intact for the length of time necessary to master the

challenging concept under study. 10. Once the concept is mastered, collaboration groups should be reformed, so that

different children have a chance to work together. 11. Collaboration groups should be both same and mixed sex in composition so

children can have an opportunity to experience both. 12. The role of the adult supervisor in a peer collaboration group should be first to

keep the children focused on the task at hand and second to review with the children what they have learned after the task is completed. Adults should not interject their own knowledge or opinions about tasks during children’s group discussions.

13. Intellectual conflict between children in a collaboration group should be kept to a moderate degree: Too much or too little debate is unfavorable to progress.

14. Adult teachers should encourage children in collaboration groups to express verbal justifications for their disagreements with one another.

15. In collaboration groups, all children should be constantly encouraged to offer solutions and express their opinions. No child should be allowed to acquire an expert status that discourages the active participation of other children in the group.

These principles, of course, must be modified according to the specific nature of the children’s school system. No educational plan can be implemented in a vacuum. All classrooms are embedded within particular schools, and all schools within particular social and cultural contexts. Curriculum needs vary accordingly: Principles of agriculture may be an essential component of schooling in one setting and irrelevant in another. Grading and evaluation requirements differ greatly from one society to the other. Educational innovations must be molded accordingly. The 15 principles cited above will be helpful in establishing guidelines, but they must be manifested differently across diverse educational contexts.

Finally, expanding the use of peer education in the schools does not mean weakening the role of adult teachers. First of all, traditional adult-based teaching would still be the major component of even the most peer-oriented school: Nothing can replace the trained teacher’s ability to introduce new knowledge to pupils. Second, adult teachers play an essential part in training, guiding, and monitoring peer tutors. Adult teachers would select the material for peer collaboration sessions,

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determine the composition of the collaboration groups, and facilitate the groups’ discussions where necessary. All of the critical arrangements and moment-by- moment decisions would still rest in the hands of the adult teacher.

As a consequence, peer-based education would actually enhance the adult teacher’s ability to do educational work in the classroom. It would free up teachers’ time and energy for extra individual attention to students and would focus this attention around strategic interactions of great educational power rather than around remedial or disciplinary incidents. Making use of children’s peer tutoring and collaborative capacities, therefore, would enable adult teachers to do more of what they are most trained and motivated to do: educate children.

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