David R. Arendale: >> Well, greetings, everyone.
I'm David Arendale,
and I'm here to give you a quick overview
of Peer-led Team Learning,
a nationally known program for bringing
academic support for students
in historically challenging courses.
There are six different programs which I monitor.
Peer-led team learning is simply one of the six.
It's a powerful program that's
used not only here inside the United States,
but also it's been adopted for use in other countries.
The definition of PLTL.
It's a model of teaching undergraduate STEM; science,
technology, engineering,
and math courses that integrates,
and that's the key word here,
integrates peer-led workshops as an integral part of
the course to increase success
for all of the enrolled students,
especially those that are historically underrepresented.
It was first created at the City University of New York,
I believe during the 1980s,
and it received NSF,
National Science Foundation,
grant support from 1991-2005.
The goals of the program is
create a seamless integration of
academic support and mastery of
the learning skills along with the challenging course.
Most oftentimes these are gateway courses,
introductory courses, in STEM majors.
Particularly, you most often tend to find this in
a chemistry or a biochemistry course.
It increases the persistence of
historically underrepresented students,
in particular, along with
the general student population in
these historically difficult majors.
There was a lot of concern back during
the 1980s and '90s that
way too many students were dropping out of STEM majors,
particularly students who are
historically underrepresented.
This could be students who might be African American,
Hispanic American, women.
There was not enough diversity of
the students who were graduating with majors in
STEM as compared with the numbers and
types of students who were enrolling in those programs.
They made a decision to do a lot of,
what we would call nowadays,
course re-design, and they ended up
placing a discussion lab
in connection with these courses.
Very well, they could have lecture components,
lab components, and also a discussion component.
The major assumption about PLTL is that
all of the students end up
benefiting from the seamless integration.
Back during the '70s and '80s, the thought was, well,
let's identify students who are "high
risk" and identify courses that were "high risk".
Well, those were really inaccurate titles.
They were also labeling and stigmatizing.
What they came up with was that you just can't depend on
voluntary participation because sometimes the students
who most need to be there end up avoiding it.
They ended up saying, well,
this is a positive pedagogy,
which we can introduce and integrate into our courses,
and we end up finding that it's beneficial
for all of the students who are enrolled in the class.
What are the requirements to implement?
Well, it takes a fair amount of work.
It's integral to the course.
The course instructor, obviously,
is going to be heavily involved in
helping to select the materials involved in training,
supervising, and reviewing what's
going on inside of these workshops.
It's an extension of their course.
The peer leaders, these are students who are selected,
they receive extensive training
and supervision for their work.
These experienced people,
these students here whenever
they come back for additional years,
well they may end up serving
roles as assistant supervisors,
first year students who are serving as
PLTL workshop leaders then.
It's heavily supported by
the department and by the institution.
This is not an inexpensive program
because they end up
seeing that this is a part of the class,
they're going to have to hire a lot of
these PLTL student leaders.
It's often going to be
two hours a week for this discussion session.
There's an awful lot of commitment
up on the front end for the institution,
but then again, you end up balancing that with,
well, what is your investment cost?
Or rather than thinking of this only as a pure cost,
what's the investment and what's going to be the yield?
The yield is going to be more students are
going to complete their STEM majors and graduate,
and you're going to have a higher diversity
of the students who complete,
which is a major objective of
the professional associations as
well as the professors who teach the courses.
Well, how do these workshops operate then?
Well, we end up having
the student leader as a facilitator.
That's what's really key here,
is that they're not re-teaching the material,
they are using group learning, active,
engaging activities,
and having the students teach themselves.
This is a facilitated,
it's not simply
a more traditional graduate seminar that you would end
up attaching to a course where
the GTA may end up
going and re-teaching parts of the material.
That's not what goes on during the workshops.
There's also a fair amount of structure,
and that's one of the other characteristics about PLTL
in comparison with some of
the other peer-assisted learning models,
is that they oftentimes have a lot more structure,
workbook materials for them to work through.
The workshop materials, they're challenging.
They're related to the course itself,
and it's useful because it helps to
structure the small group
learning activities which are occurring.
The workshops, they're all scheduled in advance.
They're part of the student schedule.
They already know whenever they enroll in
this bio-chem course or
this introductory chemistry course,
they already know not only when are
the lecture sessions going to occur for the class,
but also when the labs occur
and also the PLTL sessions then.
This is all done in advance,
two hours at a time,
and there's only 6-12 students
per each of those sessions.
If you have a class of 30-40,
you can start seeing how many of
these PLTL leaders that you're going to need then.
The student leaders, well,
it all depends on the program.
Looking at the literature,
sometimes they receive pay,
that's the most common thing.
Sometimes they end up receiving academic credit.
It depends on what the institution wants to do.
Well, how can you go and evaluate how
effective this PLTL program has been?
Well, it's already been used nationwide.
In fact, as I follow
the professional literature about
Pierce's learning programs,
I now have a annotated bibliography that
runs over 1,550 articles,
PLTL has the fastest growth
of articles that are being produced to
describe their program and rigorous studies
that help document the effectiveness of the program.
In order for you to be able to do this,
some upper level support.
It's going to take a stable budget
because it's an expensive program in terms of real costs,
but also what is it that you want to get?
Once again, it's like when I talked about
the ESP program in a separate video tape.
The same thing applies here,
is that, what do you want to get as an outcome?
A lot of faculty time is going to be involved in this.
You're going to take probably an undergraduate,
and then some institutions are going to require
a graduate student to serve as the PLTL leader then.
As I said, oftentimes we're
going to have a salary for these leaders.
Also, you're probably also going to need to give
some overtime or some course release
for the faculty members.
What's the bottom line?
Whenever you look at all the research studies
and evaluation,
this is what they come up with.
It's highly effective for transformation of
a historically challenging intro science course
for all enrolled students.
Once again, it's another example of the term which is
oftentimes used today about course redesign,
and that's the reason why
institutions are willing to make those investments.
What are some outstanding research studies
and articles that have come out in recent years?
Well, I just simply sampled out five of them here.
There's hundreds of those,
which you can be able to find if you end up looking
at the annotated bibliography.
I think that one of
these articles here that I just picked
up at a random talks about doing this online.
At the time that I'm recording this,
we're in the middle of March of 2020
and institutions across
the United States and
probably in other countries are all going
to online instruction because of the flu pandemic.
As I said, there's a fair amount of
structure that goes along with
PLTL because of the rigor that
occurs during these workshop sessions.
There's a couple of books
that are out there that have been
published by the PLTL creators.
One is a handbook for team leaders,
another one over here is a guidebook for peer leaders,
both of which I picked up as use books off of Amazon.
Then also I found some other workbooks that
the PLTL creators also
made for use in a general organic course,
a general chemistry class,
and an organic chemistry class.
Once again, I pick those all up
through Amazon as use books.
Well, a key place for you to go is to
the website for peer-led team learning.
That's pltlis.org/.
You can end up finding information on conferences,
publications, journals, and all the rest.
They end up having an international conference
every single year, lots of workshops.
It's a place to go to.
If you really want to understand PLTL,
that would be the place that I would invest
some funds to go to the conference and then to go
to a local college that's using PLTL and visit with
the coordinator of the program and also to sit in and
watch a couple of the workshops
actually occurring themselves.
As I said, I'm in charge of a publication that
now ranges up to 1,550 publications,
most of which are all research studies.
I have a real interest in peer-assisted learning.
For me, my background is helping to
disseminate supplemental instruction and also,
as it's called in other countries, PASS,
for peer-assisted study sessions.
That's my particular background area.
But I'm interested in all of
these major national models
because I think that they're all
instructive and I enjoy being able to
share about them with
other people who don't know about them.
As I said, there's 1,550.
If you end up going to this website, z.umn.edu/peerbib.
If you end up going to there,
you can see and download the general total bibliography.
You can also download just what it is that you want.
If you want to just look at peer-led team learning,
you can just download that particular bibliography.
I also have a whole series of
topical sub bibliographies that
come out of all of this work,
and probably one of the ones that's the hottest right now
of particular interest in March of 2020,
is one that looks at
publications that talk how they're taking
these different programs and
they're conducting them online.
Once again, I think that
this is a great place for you to come,
dig deeper, and
understand more about peer-led team learning.
In enormous number of publications,
I would guess probably it must be up to,
I don't know,
400, 500 different publications,
and many of these are in some of
the most scholarly journals that you can imagine.
If you'd like to know
more information about peer learning,
I have four different websites that you can go to.
We've already been talking about one of them,
and that's the one on Peer Bib.
That's where you can go and look
at the annotated bibliography.
It's going to include the abstract of the article,
and you'll be able to figure out, well,
which ones do I really want to go read?
The nice thing is that, when possible,
I end up having URL web links.
You can actually skip having
to going to the library or to enter library alone,
you can actually go and download the articles themselves.
There's three other websites.
One of them is my general site of
training materials oftentimes by other people.
That one is that same
z.umn.edu/ except this one
has the end of it peer learning.
There's also one that ends with pubspeer.
Those are all the publications which I
have written about peer-assisted learning,
the majority of which are ones about
supplemental instruction and
also about peer-assisted learning,
which is a hybrid model which we
developed at the University of Minnesota
based off of best practices
of the Emerging Scholars Program,
peer-led team learning, and supplemental Instruction.
Then finally, we have a YouTube page.
That's Peer Learning YouTube.
If you're interested, you can also see
the summary overview videos for ESP,
PLTL, SI, and the other ones.
Well, they're all located there.
Also, if you just simply like to be able to get
together and talk with me on the phone or exchange email,
well, my contact information
is down there on the bottom of the screen then.
Well, thanks for spending
a couple of minutes with me here.
I appreciate opportunity to
share about our wonderful program.
I hope these words are useful to you in your work
in helping students to achieve their dreams. Best wishes.