Resumen de Peer enhancement of learning and teaching for teacher educators

Jenene Burke, Margaret Plunkett, Boli Li

• Providing formal opportunities for colleagues to learn from and with each other through a relational model is recognized as an important strategy for enhancing teaching and learning for teacher educators. Peer enhancement of learning and teaching can extend to a variety of learning and teaching activities such as team teaching, dropping in to other’s sessions, moderation of assessment and feedback, joint research-student supervision, student feedback, and program and curriculum development. Peer enhancement is likely to provide opportunities for teacher learning regardless of the role occupied in the peer relationship.

  This paper reports on research that investigates teacher learning in a broad range of self-selected peer enhancement activities that were formally undertaken by a group of colleagues in a school of education in an Australian university. Teacher educators opted in to the scheme and developed peer projects in small teams to enhance their professional practice. The theoretical underpinning of the adopted peer enhancement model is described and justified along with the Participatory Action Research (PAR) methodology that was utilized in the study. Data were collected from teachers’ reflections on their learning in the program and from individual interviews conducted with participants. The preliminary qualitative data from the first trial of the program demonstrates the diversity of peer enhancement projects developed by the participants and the self-reported depth of their learning. The evidence shows that peer enhancement benefits the learning of all participants regardless of the role they adopt in the peer enhancement scheme.