An experience with a peer assisted teaching schemeDaryl D’Souza

School of Computer Science & IT RMIT University

Melbourne, Australia daryl.dsouza@rmit.edu.au

Angela Carbone OPVCLT

Monash University Caulfield, Australia

angela.carbone@monash.edu

Astrid Bauers School of Computer Science & IT

RMIT University Melbourne, Australia

astrid.bauers@rmit.edu.au

Bella Ross OPVCLT

Monash University Caulfield, Australia

bella.ross@monash.edu

Abstract—We present a narrative around the use of a peer assisted teaching program to establish its utility in improving teaching and learning outcomes. The program is a structured and collegial approach where academics work together to reinvigorate their teaching practice through reflection and peer-assisted situated learning. The scheme involves colleagues collaborating to analyse existing course and teaching quality data, develop focussed development goals for curriculum and pedagogy, plan and execute strategies to achieve these goals, and monitor their effects and success during a teaching semester. The experience presented in this paper involved a paired peer relationship between two Information and Communication Technology (ICT) lecturers (colleagues) who taught disparate courses and who had separate goals. Despite the apparent dichotomy in the courses taught and the course outcomes, their experience with a small set of goals provided useful information about employing such a scheme, especially its effectiveness despite choosing simple goals. The partners were also inspired to use the scheme again and with a stronger sense of how they might prepare their goals and pursue better implementation thereof. The authors hope the experience will encourage others to adopt such a program or other similar peer assisted teaching schemes to improve teaching and learning outcomes, encourage collegial collaboration within departments, and foster engagement with learning and teaching scholarship.

Keywords—teaching innovations; best practices; experience sharing in computing and engineering education

I. INTRODUCTION This paper presents and discusses the experiences of two

academic teaching staff members in information technology who undertook a Peer Assisted Teaching Scheme (PATS). Despite beginning PATS with different aims, the participants found the experience useful and valuable. Both participants were colleagues in the same ICT school at RMIT University with varied teaching experience and current teaching contexts.

The experience of using PATS was unsurprisingly beneficial but surprisingly painless, while allowing the participants to uncover valuable feedback for what appeared to be small steps or aims. In pursuing such aims PATS elicited a reflective mindset and a desire to use it again with future improvements to aim for or indeed to uncover answers to questions about aspects of teaching and learning that may help overcome prevailing difficulties and challenges. As an aside, PATS is an excellent fillip for scholarship through its guidelines to document actions, instruments, reflections and outcomes.

The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. Section 2 presents a description of PATS, its history and the processes involved in assisting peers to improve their teaching. Section 3 outlines the research context and provides descriptions of the participants’ courses (also known as units). Section 4 presents descriptions of our divergent experiences using the peer teaching assisted teaching scheme. Here we present the experience of Pa and Pb in the context of the tasks, and how the scheme was applied in the ICT context. We reflect on our experiences in Section 5 and present the outcomes as well as how we might improve our teaching strategies in future. Finally, we present our conclusions about our use of PATS, how it might be improved or better utilised, and any future work

II. BACKGROUND

A. History of the Peer Assisted Teaching Scheme PATS was initially developed to address courses with low

student satisfaction with the quality of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in the Faculty of Information Technology at Monash University in Victoria, Australia [2]. The primary aims of the scheme were to: (i) improve the level of student satisfaction with courses identified as in need of improvement; and (ii) build leadership capacity by engaging teachers recognized as outstanding.

PATS is heavily influenced by research that highlights the benefits of Peer Assisted Learning programs directed at students [7], but instead applies it to academic teaching staff.

2014 International Conference on Teaching and Learning in Computing and Engineering

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DOI 10.1109/LaTiCE.2014.65

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The scheme is further informed by Lave’s situated learning literature [3],[4], Vygotsky’s socio-cultural theory [8], and Brookfield’s [1] critical reflective processes which uses the self, student, peer and scholarly literature lenses.

The 2009 pilot scheme resulted in demonstrated improvements in the level of student satisfaction with courses [2] and this led to a trial of PATS in other disciplines at Monash University in 2010, supported by an Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC) Teaching Fellowship grant. In 2012, PATS was trialled across several other Australian universities: The University of Newcastle (New South Wales), Griffith University, University of Sunshine Coast (Queensland), and Edith Cowan University (Western Australia). This trial was funded by the Council of Australian Directors of Academic Development (CADAD). In 2013 PATS was expanded further and rolled out at fourteen universities and private higher education institutions nationwide as part of an Office for Learning and Teaching (OLT) funded National Senior Teaching Fellowship.

B. The Peer Assisted Teaching Scheme Process The PATS scheme follows a structured and reflective-

practice process to improve and reinvigorate teaching practice [6]. Academic teachers are provided with input, support and guidance to assist in reinvigorating their teaching and course through peer partnerships where participants are strongly encouraged to reflect on their teaching practice [5]. The two core partnership types are the mentor-mentee and the reciprocal partnership. Participants are provided with a PATS workbook providing a structured framework for the scheme over the course of a teaching semester. The workbook contains seven tasks for participants to complete together with their partners, as shown in Figure 1.

Three of these tasks occur before semester starts, two during semester, and two after the semester is completed. In Task 1 ‘meet and greet’ participants meet in person, get to know each other and their teaching and course context and establish some ground rules on how the partnership will operate. Task 2 ‘break down the barriers’ is used to establish the partnership and focus on the barriers to improving teaching practice. Here participants are asked to consider the barriers

they face in their teaching, and identify solutions to these barriers. In task 3 ‘goal for improvement’, participants are asked to set goals and formulate strategies to reinvigorate their teaching practice. Task 4 asks participants to ‘gather informal student feedback’ and task 5 ‘peer review’ requires a peer observation of teaching. Participants are asked to critically reflect on their teaching and course in Task 6 ‘critical reflection’. The final task, task 7 ‘performance development’ requires academics to capture the qualitative and quantitative changes in their performance and how it relates to teaching improvement, educational leadership and education standing.

III. RESEACH CONTEXT This paper describes a peer partnership between two

academics in the ICT department of RMIT University. The two participants, denoted here as participants Pa and Pb, used PATS to explore their courses denoted, Ca and Cb, respectively. Pa delivered Ca, a first year programming course and Pb delivered Cb, entitled Engineering Software Projects, an elective delivered to latter year undergraduate students and post graduate students at various levels of their degree. This course does not involve any programming or related subject matter, rather, it is quite theoretical but with practical outcomes, and requires a different mindset than is usual in ICT mainstream courses, although in future it will be mandatory in all ICT degrees. The challenge for Pb was to provide a high level, but comprehensive, overview of a very large topic in the one course.

In ICT disciplines, both nationally and internationally, first year programming has been known to suffer high failure and attrition rates, with programming being a particular “learning bottleneck”, yet its importance to success in ICT cannot be overemphasised. Compounding this already known problem with first year programming, Pa was also concerned that the contact hours for students had been cut by 45% (from 7 hours to 4 hours) since the course had been delivered previous to semester 1, 2013. Pa had previously attended a symposium outlining the scheme in 2012 and recognised an opportunity to monitor the success or otherwise of any compensatory strategies to ensure that the cuts in contact hours could be contained. PATS seemed like it might provide opportunities for

Fig. 1. The peer assisted teaching program [6]

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a more guided approach to implementing and monitoring such strategies.

The participants chose the PATS peer partner arrangement from among a range of partnership options, as their modus operandi in the scheme. The peer arrangement was the most desirable option because both participants had previously known each other, had received reasonably good teaching feedback over time, and neither saw the need to mentor the other but instead to share ideas and insights that may apply generically across courses. Pa was looking at PATS, not to reinvigorate their course (Ca), but to ensure that strategies developed to maintain its good OSI did in fact help to retain such past success.

Despite the different focus of the participants, both found that PATS presented opportunities to share ideas for revision sessions and in brainstorming over each task with benefits to both parties. The experience has also provided the participants with the opportunity to potentially share survey instruments in the future. These were revelations that would not have come to light without the PATS experience.

IV. USING PEER ASSISTED TEACHING IN ICT AT RMIT The findings are presented in the form of two case studies,

Pa in Section 4.1 and Pb in Section 4.2. These will explore in detail the very different barriers faced by the two academics, the goals that they set for their courses and how they proposed to solve these issues. These reflections are based on the PATS workbook task data for tasks 2 and 3. Task 2 asks participants to reflect on the barriers (internal and external) that may impact on one’s teaching. Once participants have reflected on what the barriers are, they are invited, where possible, to find solutions. Task 3 asks academics to state what their specific goals are for the teaching semester and how they propose to achieve these goals.

A. Case Study 1: Barriers, Goals and Solutions 1) Identifying the Barriers: Pa, who has 30 plus years of teaching experience did not

feel any such internal barriers, citing the benefits of greater sector understanding of teaching and learning needs, more control and autonomy over curriculum decisions, and far more time for reflection and self-development in the past. To mitigate the temptation to simplify the course, a range of solutions was adopted, noting especially that these were first year students. These included more appropriate strategies such as to motivate students to work harder and to pursue a "more with less" strategy in formal classes, adding additional support for student learning outside of classes (e.g. non-assessed online self-study exercises), and encouraging students to use all of the available resources. An internal solution is to explain clearly some good, weekly time management strategies in relation to the 12 credit point context of the course.

External barriers are further classified into those within one’s control and those outside of one’s control. In Pa’s course the external barriers faced are the problems of transition from the final year of school to first year of university. Strategies included better alignment of assessment with class content and, importantly, dissemination of clear sets of instructions each week, listing key aims in any given week. Students are advised

that among the many emails they will receive they must give very high priority to the emails titled "Housekeeping Matters", which list the tasks for the relevant week.

A key external barrier that fell outside of Pa’s control was the school decision to slash student contact hours from 7 per week to 4 per week, on top of the other usual external barriers - including early-semester ITS problems, class scheduling, student inability to enroll and the greater diversity of cohort among students, as well as the diversity in student ability and entry scores. As stated above, the "more with less" approach is used in formal classes in order to ensure that the stated external barriers may be overcome. More with less relates to judiciously composed material that provides simpler contexts for students to comprehend concepts and to take away ownership of their learning and understanding into further study outside of formal classes. Support is essential outside of classes in the form of good teaching team as well as incentives to retain the enthusiasm of students throughout the semester.

2) Clarifying Goals and Finding Solutions: Pa had to take remedial action to counter any potential

disaster resulting from severe cuts in student contact hours for course Ca, as outlined earlier. The challenge was to ensure that essential material was retained in terms of various assessment drivers for stated learning outcomes, particularly as most students enrolled are making a start to serious learning of programming, with all the known challenges faced in the discipline, both nationally and internationally.

Unfortunately, due to the cuts in student contact hours, key learning opportunities and assessments were eliminated from lectures, including quizzes that were discussed in lectures and then assessed in tutorials, and a mid-semester test that served as a progress check around the understanding of concepts covered by the mid-way point. Assignments were downsized and course material for all classes was chunked into deliverable components and private study components, all of which was disseminated to the teaching team prior to semester commencement.

To counter any potential compromise of learning outcomes, greater effort was made to register all students and expose them to the ViLLE visualisation tool, for self-study and assessments purposes, the aim being to ensure regular contact with programming exercises in the absence of quizzes and the mid-semester test.

B. Case Study 2: Barriers, Goals and Solutions 1) Identifying the Barriers: There were several barriers for Pb. One, as mentioned, was

the diverse cohort of students, ranging from young undergraduates who had had no industry experience and little understanding of structured projects other than through their previous course assignments, to postgraduate students completing their Masters degrees, some with no experience, others who had been working in industry for several years. Additionally, the students were a mixture of local and international students of various ethnicities, with differing understandings of, and appreciation for the value of correct software engineering project processes.

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Another barrier was the challenge of covering a very large topic in a short amount of time, so that students would be able to utilize their learnings when joining the workforce. Change Management, Risk Management, Scheduling and Managing Tasks and Resources, are each in themselves worthy of full course content. Students needed to consider these, and other topics, to complete their assignments which included Project Charters, comprehensive gannt charts, Risk Registers, and so on. The interconnectedness of all of the parts needed to be understood in terms of successful practical project outcomes, but in pseudo project delivery. This understanding, for subsequent application, is not easy for students who do not attend lectures/workshops. While there are many textbooks covering this material, the challenge is to make the subject matter real. As Pb has had many years of industry experience, ‘real life’ anecdotes contributed to the conversation, but these are missed if students are not present.

There is a plethora of references and information on the topic of SE project management, and this is ever changing as new methodologies advance in practice. Ideally, the course content would have been re-structured to include more actual project successes and failures - to this most students answered “Myki” in chorus! (Myki being the newest ticketing system used in metropolitan Melbourne and is commonly known for its failings) The real constraint here, for Pb, was time.

In addition, a new structure was imposed, where lectures and tutorials were combined in a three hour time slot, followed by a one hour lab for practical assignment work. This in itself could have been a very beneficial restructure, but was not successful due to the real barrier of conducting workshops in a full lecture theatre with constrained seating arrangements.

2) Clarifying Goals and Finding Solutions: As discussed above, with mixed student cohorts and

restricted time and facilities, the idea that one size fits all, and that one style and pace of delivery fits all, is not feasible, and determining the correct level of interest and capabilities continues to be the challenge.

The benefit of clarifying goals and finding solutions via the PATS process in itself mimics the subject of engineering software projects, where the larger objective – the vision and scope of a project – is decomposed to the smaller working parts and then recomposed for a clear, comprehensive outcome, and was thus very useful and relevant.

V. REFLECTIONS AND OUTCOMES On reflection of the scheme, Pa found the experience to be

refreshing in its simplicity and its ability to potentially drive improvements as well as rear guard strategies in the event of imposed austerity measures. Additionally, the scheme evoked ways to better plan ahead with various tasks. Finally, the peer relationship revealed several beneficial strategies which Pa could well adopt in his future teaching, including regular soliciting of feedback and improved revision of class presentations.

Pb reflected that the peer experience had assisted her in addressing the issues described. In addition to the PATS tasks, simple informal face to face discussion with her peer caused her to reflect on how to teach students to themselves become

reflective practitioners. It also highlighted how very different subject matter – programming skills and project management skills, importantly contribute to the whole of an understanding of ICT, and that further cross pollination would benefit academics in this aim.

The obvious broad pursuit of any peer assisted teaching scheme is to improve teaching and learning. However, the participants originally had disparate aims: one to invigorate their course, and the other to address delivery of their course amidst cuts in student contact hours. In a sense these aims could be construed as being consistent with improving or at least preserving existing evaluation scores. The participants entered their partnership with such a goal but with a need to secure a deeper and more intellectual understanding of their course and student needs, in terms of delivery, content and other factors impacting on teaching and learning.

One of the findings to emerge from this PATS experience was that although the participants taught in very different areas, the teaching aspects that were discussed and reflected upon remained the same for the participants. In fact, the difference in content areas allowed the participants to focus on the teaching without getting distracted by the content of what was being taught. The process shown in Fig. 1 provided a structure wherein this could be accomplished as it forced a disciplined approach to setting, discussing, monitoring and reflecting on individual goals which, though individual, were generic in their objectives. The scheme allowed the two academics from different areas to work together on improving their teaching, thereby fostering their relationship. The scheme directly encourages academic teaching staff to pair up and allows participants the opportunity to gain a different perspective and new insights into their teaching practice.

As stated above, the subject matter being taught in the two courses was quite different and was taught to different cohorts of students. Both participants believe that further cross pollination would benefit academics within the school, for a broader understanding of the school programs as a whole, and for a broader understanding of the larger, common, issues and concerns and ways of student learning as a whole. This need not be limited to partnerships within one school or one faculty but could be diversified across schools, faculties, and indeed, higher education organisations.

VI. CONCLUSION Our PATS experience is one that we would be willing to

pursue again, taking into account the lessons learnt from the experience reported in this paper. Our cautious enthusiasm to do so has its basis in several key benefits we identify. A peer-assisted program such as PATS offers the flexibility and task-oriented drivers to facilitate the collegiality needed to support and assist academics who face very different concerns. Moreover, in the case of PATS, the tasks are well structured and achievable amidst the burdensome workloads that prevail in tertiary institutions, both nationally and internationally.

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REFERENCES [1] S. Brookfield, Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher. San-Francisco,

CA: Jossey-Bass, 1995. [2] A. Carbone, J. Ceddia and J. Wong, "A Scheme for Improving ICT

Units with Critically Low Student Satisfaction." In Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE). Darmstadt, Germany, 2011.

[3] J. Lave, Cognition in Practice: Mind, mathematics, and culture in everyday life, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

[4] J. Lave, The Practice of Learning, Contemporary Theories of Learning: Learning Theorists... in Their Own Words, London; New York: Routledge, 2009.

[5] J. J. Loughran, “Effective reflective practice: In search of meaning in learning about teaching,” Journal of Teacher Education, vol. 53(1), 2002 pp. 33-43.

[6] PATS. Peer Assisted Teaching Scheme, www.monash.edu/PATS, 2013. [7] K. J. Topping, Peer assisted learning: A practical guide for teachers.

Cambridge, MA: Brookline Books, 2001. [8] L. Vygotsky, Mind in society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press, 1978.

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