32 | JADE
DAVID S BLANCHARD AND ELIOT REES
peer-assisted learning, peer-teaching and near-peer teaching. We prefer the term‘ peer-teaching’ as it is already widely used to describe teaching that takes place between medical students( Ross & Cameron 2007, Mackinnon et al 2009, ten Cate et al 2012). Moreover, we feel‘ peer-teaching’ is a more accurate description than‘ near-peer teaching’ as although the students involved in such activities are usually from the same medical school they might be in quite different academic years. Furthermore, near-peer teaching is perhaps a confusing description of an activity that can take place between students in different geographical locations( Lynch et al 2014). It has been our experience that the term‘ peerassisted learning’ can be confused with‘ peer-mentoring’, which is an entirely different form of student-student interaction with the emphasis on both social and academic pastoral support( Jefferies & Skidmore 2010). Finally, we feel that‘ peer-teaching’ emphasises the importance of the teaching, rather than the learning, as in‘ peerassisted learning’.
Tip 2: Don’ t underestimate student enthusiasm for this type of learning
From our own experiences of organising peer teaching sessions at Keele, from student input at a workshop and parallel sessions at the Association for the Study of Medical Education( ASME) 2014 Conference and others( Field et al 2007, Ross & Cameron 2007, Lockspeiser et al 2008, Mackinnon et al 2009, Silbert & Lake 2012, Nelson et al 2013) it is clear that there is great enthusiasm among medical students to be involved with peer-teaching. There will, therefore, almost certainly be a great demand for peer-teaching if offered and organised outside the curriculum and it is important to provide an adequate number of places and to allocate these places equitably. At Keele we have successfully used free on-line sign-up packages( e. g. www. signupgenius. com) which facilitate the offering and fair allocation of students onto courses when places are limited. Of course, such issues might be avoided if peer-teaching activities were to be established as compulsory parts of the undergraduate curriculum.
Tip 3: Find out what is going on already.
Although Wadoodi and Crosby( 2002) suggested the integration of peer-teaching into the medical course there are only a very few reported accounts of this actually taking place( Burgess et al 2014). At Keele we set out to develop intracurricular peer-teaching but found that a significant amount of peer-teaching was already taking