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