Integrating Peer Teaching in a Modeling and Simulation Course

In this paper, we present our experience in integrating peer teaching into a modeling and simulation engineering course. We also report student perception as a student teacher and separately as a student learner as well as the lessons learned. Unlike common practices of peer teaching, which usually focuses on tutoring, mentoring, and problem solving, students in our class were required to form teams and each team was required to give a mini-lecture on a pre-approved topic within the scope of the course. This design of peer teaching has two purposes. First, from the students' perspective, they get to experience what it takes to prepare and teach a mini-lecture on a topic that is relevant to modeling and simulation. Second, from the instructor's perspective, the mini-lectures given by student teams could complement the lectures prepared and given by the instructor. Student perception both as a student teacher and as a student learner was collected via a questionnaire with 16 questions (8 for perception as a student teacher and 8 for perception as a student learner) and two open-ended questions. Students were overwhelmingly positive about the peer teaching experience. The findings of our study are consistent with those of previous studies on peer teaching. Furthermore, a few areas of improvements were also identified to help enhance future active learning pedagogy design.