Learning from Our Classmates
Many teachers and educators have recognized the benefits of learning from the classmates, as a new format of our educational concept. They point on its effectiveness for the improvement of educational process from many perspectives. However, many teachers ask their students: who can it be, the mate you would like to learn from?
To my mind, the most important personal characteristics of an ideal classmate I would learn from should include strong communication skills, abilities to explain and exemplify, and, certainly, friendly behavior and good personal connection to me. First of all, this person has to earn my respect and trust with his/her behaviors and reactions, and, in turn, I should feel the response and friendly attitude towards myself from this person, too.
Abilities to be plain and clear in communication and get the ideas across are not less principal. It is hard to learn something from somebody, who can not express his/her thoughts clearly. In addition, the person I would learn form must have some wide spectrum of interests and hobbies, which would be interesting for me as well, so we would have many common points and things to share. I guess the process of learning is much more effective and challenging, when it turns into exchanging of the ideas and knowledge.
I do not think it matters a lot, what is ethnic origin, cultural or religious community membership or economic opportunities of this person. On the contrary, it would be interesting to learn more about other religions, customs and traditions. Therefore, I still consider personal characteristics and communicating abilities to be the most important factors for establishing good ties for peer-to-peer learning.
Of course, the best way to learn something new is learning in the groups. In such case students can effectively help each other with some unclear points, discuss some key details of new material, and everybody can express own opinion and point of view. Learning from the classmates is a brilliant and very resourceful technology, based on cooperation and mutual assistance. It helps not only to achieve good progress on different subjects, but also to create strong and friendly relationships between the class mates, to improve the discipline and to make lessons more challenging and interesting.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009 at 1:09 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.