From marbles to instant messenger™: implications of Piaget's ideas about peer learning - This Issue

PIAGET'S THEORY IS PROPERLY ASSOCIATED with educational practices that encourage students' active participation in the teaching-learning process. This article describes some of Piaget's ideas about peer relationships, which professional educators may find useful for classroom applications. Any educational practice, including peer learning, should be systematically examined and evaluated. This article provides a framework for such an evaluation using Piaget's theory as a basis. After describing two important goals of peer learning, the point is made that teachers need to be mindful of the socio-moral context in which peer learning occurs. Teachers also need to consider the impact of peer learning on students' thoughts and feelings about school-work and their classmates. Finally, peer interactions and peer learning using modern technology are discussed.

Current Educational Practice: Why Have Peer Learning?

It has become commonplace in many schools for teachers to require that students work in teams to complete academic tasks. Such peer work might take place during class time or as part of a homework assignment. When assigned as homework, peer projects often require the students' families to coordinate their schedules so that students can find a time and a place to do the required work. These different contexts for peer learning activities are discussed in the next section of this article. Regardless of the setting, or the specific curriculum area, the underlying idea is that student achievement will be enhanced when peer activities are part of the instructional process. The main purpose of using peer learning in schools is to sharpen academic skills such as listening and communication, and to enhance subject matter mastery by promoting deeper levels of understanding based on discussion and a free exchange of ideas.

Peer learning has a second potential educational benefit for students, namely, learning how to manage interactions with classmates in order to have an effective and successful team experience. For example, students might discover that even though classmates can have different opinions and points of view, it is still important to treat each member of the team with respect in order to maintain group functioning. As the United States becomes more heterogeneous with respect to cultural, ethnic, and language backgrounds (Schmitt, 2001), developing positive attitudes towards, and learning about, classmates who differ from one's self and how to interact with them, will become an increasingly important part of the school experience. The necessity for such preparation in the adult worlds of work and community are another driving force behind the growing use of peer work in modern American schools. As we turn from current practice to Piaget's theory, these two main objectives of peer learning--sharpening academic skills and managing interactions with classmates--will be explicitly addressed.

The Socio-Moral Climate: Constraint and Cooperation

Piaget (1932) studied children's relationships with parents and with peers more than 70 years ago. He identified enduring forms, patterns, or structures inherent in social relationships that merit our attention despite the many changes in children's lives that have taken place since then. In relationships that have constraint as their underlying form, one person has the right to dictate terms to the other, who is obligated to obey without question. The two persons in the relationship are not on equal footing, and the subordinate member is supposed to have unilateral respect for the authority-figure member. Many child-adult relationships (e.g, child-parent or child-teacher) and some child-child relationships (e.g., child-older child) have constraint as their underlying basis. In relationships that have cooperation as their underlying form, neither person has the right to dictate terms to the other, and neither person is obligated to obey the other. Instead, the two persons are on equal footing, and each is free to agree or disagree with the other. This type of relationship is based upon and provokes mutual respect between partners. Many child-child relationships have cooperation as their underlying basis, and many child-adult relationships have elements of cooperation.

Children's ideas about rules (in games such as marbles and of social conduct such as moral imperatives) based on cooperative relationships appeared after and were developmentally more advanced than ideas about rules based on constraint (Piaget, 1932). Notions of rules based on unilateral respect and constraint were found to be immature and misguided from an adult point of view. Children move beyond constraint when they reinvent the rules for themselves by working with partners for whom they have mutual respect. For example, a child who is forced to share his toys with a friend and only does so out of unilateral respect for his mother, is not very likely to continue to share when the mother is not around to observe play. On the other hand, a child might re-invent the idea of sharing on his own. This could be based on seeing the spontaneous joy of a friend when a toy is freely offered, and the feeling that occurs when the act is reciprocated. A child who shares for this reason is more likely to share at a later point in time than is a child who is forced to share by an authority figure. In both cases, the child's overt behavior consisted of sharing; but in the first instance, the underlying basis was not as firmly a part of the child's repertoire as was the second instance.