An experience with a peer assisted teaching scheme

We present a narrative around the use of a peer assisted teaching program to establish its utility in improving teaching and learning outcomes. The program is a structured and collegial approach where academics work together to reinvigorate their teaching practice through reflection and peer-assisted situated learning. The scheme involves colleagues collaborating to analyse existing course and teaching quality data, develop focussed development goals for curriculum and pedagogy, plan and execute strategies to achieve these goals, and monitor their effects and success during a teaching semester. The experience presented in this paper involved a paired peer relationship between two Information and Communication Technology (ICT) lecturers (colleagues) who taught disparate courses and who had separate goals. Despite the apparent dichotomy in the courses taught and the course outcomes, their experience with a small set of goals provided useful information about employing such a scheme, especially its effectiveness despite choosing simple goals. The partners were also inspired to use the scheme again and with a stronger sense of how they might prepare their goals and pursue better implementation thereof. The authors hope the experience will encourage others to adopt such a program or other similar peer assisted teaching schemes to improve teaching and learning outcomes, encourage collegial collaboration within departments, and foster engagement with learning and teaching scholarship.