Peer-Led Team Learning: Adjunct to lectures in an electrical engineering course for non-majors

Peer-Led Team Learning (PLTL) is a recognized model for teaching and learning in which select students in a course return in later semesters to serve as peer leaders who facilitate small learning groups. At our institution (a small, private, research-intensive university), this technique is adopted in Workshops; our peer leaders meet weekly with small groups of students to guide them through sets of exercises designed by the instructor(s) of the course. Peer leaders receive instruction and support in pedagogy and group dynamics in a course jointly taught by a learning specialist from the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL) and the instructor of the course. Workshops have been adopted in many courses, ranging from Chemistry, Biology, Earth Sciences, Physics, and Optics, to Economics and Business. This paper describes the use of Workshops for several years in an Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) course intended for non-ECE majors. We discuss the processes and pitfalls for initiating the use of Workshops in this and other courses, present an example of Workshop problems and questions currently in use, and discuss the value of the Workshops to students, peer leaders, and faculty as told to us in surveys, course journals, and reflective sessions held after the course.