Peer Partners, Pure Mentors

Peer Partners, Pure Mentors

When I recognized that seventh grade students lacked information in a note-taking (discovery) assignment I had given, I knew I need made a decision that would carry through the next part of my planning – Focused Research with a Presentation.  Since this class is 50% seventh grade students and 50% eighth grade students, and with the 8^th graders working through the information gathering much more effectively, I decided to create peer partnerships.  These partnerships were between one 7^th grade student and one 8^th grade student, but I considered much more than just their grade.  I paired students according to data and observations about ability, motivation, energy, interest, volume, talents, attendance, and other factors.  No partnership was built of two males. 

First, each partnership shared their citations.  When a piece of information was missing from an individual’s notes that either of the partners thought was important, both would go to the cited page and find the information to include on both sets of notes.  Not only did they end up with much of the same facts, but suddenly, the important facts were making it to all of the papers.  As a reminder, this was only the notes for exploring the History of Theater in the United States. 

Next, we needed to know more… or more in-depth.  At this point I decided to keep these partnerships (which were quite thoughtfully created) and move into the Focused Research assignment.  We started with 8 locations from around the world that had notable histories of theatrics.  We had 12 partnerships.  After adding 4 more locations or time periods to our list, I randomly assigned a location/time to each partnership.  They were then given an opportunity to trade their time/location topic with other partnerships who were willing.  (This was a great experience because I heard a partnership agree to give up “Broadway” – the most sought-after topic – for Persia, with the comment, “We’ll take Persia since we don’t really know anything about it.” !!!)  

Once the dust settled and every partnership had accepted their assigned or traded location, we started talking mini-research and the expectations for this presentation.  Basically, we recalled how to keep track of resources (and how important it is TO keep track of sources), what the accepted mediums would be for the presentation, and the rubric for the presentation (the required information, presentation itself, and timing.  We are currently about to start the presentations of the research, so I will have to follow-up on the results.

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*****update*****

Post Presentations:

Excitedly, I’m able to share that the partnerships were successful. As I continued to check in on partnerships, in order to check their pacing, I was also able to check content. Not only did every partnership stay on task and meet the milestones, all presentations were given by their assigned date. The diverse partnerships proved to be complimentary; I had no reports of inequality in effort. Using the rubric designed for the presentation, the class average including the 12 groups was 94%.