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Thanks to a post at The Engineer’s Pulse, I learned about Harvard Professor Eric Mazur. He’s done a lot of work — perhaps it could be called teacher action research — on the advantages of peer work over lecturing as an effective instructional tool.
You can read more about his work at a recent Harvard Magazine article titled Twilight of the Lecture. I’ve also embedded below a talk by him about his work.
I’ll be adding this post to The Best Posts Questioning If Direct Instruction Is “Clearly Superior.”
Not sure, but isn’t Peer Instruction Direct Instruction? It involves 15 min of lectures punctuated by concept quizzes with peers. To quote one of Mazur’s papers, “to achieve this, some direct instruction in quantitative problem-solving skills is necessary”(link below). A better description might be PI is active teaching or DI properly done because according to the education researcher John Hattie, the DI teacher “evaluates if they understand what they have been told by checking for understanding, and re-telling them what they have told by tying it all together with closure.” It is this that contributes to the success of Peer Instruction.
Read more: What works best http://www.learningandteaching.info/teaching/what_works.htm#ixzz1wbgkQACK
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https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:PlC6gsxEpWcJ:web.mit.edu/jbelcher/www/TEALref/Crouch_Mazur.pdf+&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESgSS814NIl6hmghuIPv_T5lEY1mMEiZhT-ZF0wUtSlAjU23p4IA34IAwgKf2iqj_I8gBpOPXfK8y_oCLpYB30jREslWAK8fmLfpbb9powLDANSkLYc79zLAWWhoRfY51Mb-_SRQ&sig=AHIEtbSPnQohpDquheZbasXHc3WVA5O9-w&pli=1