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Programs & Strategies for Positive Behavior

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Behavior Support for Positive Student Behavior

Character Education • Effective Behavioral Supports • The Good Behavior Game • Peer Tutoring • Positive Reinforcement • Project Achieve • Project Pathe • Second Step

Programs and Strategies for Positive Behavior:
School-Wide Programs & Strategies:
Peer Tutoring

Student Population Served
Class-wide or School-wide
All grades

Program Description
Peer tutoring is an organized learning experience in which one student serves as the teacher or tutor, and the other student is the learner or tutee. This approach to tutoring provides students with an opportunity to use their knowledge in a meaningful, social fashion. Peer tutors reinforce their own learning process by reviewing and reformulating their knowledge. Tutees receive the opportunity for skill development in a non-threatening context. Both tutors and tutees gain self-confidence, the tutor by seeing self-competence in his or her ability to help someone and the tutee by receiving positive reinforcement from peers. All students with some level of responsibility can be given the opportunity to be tutors. Guidelines for pairing tutors and tutees are fairly broad and will likely depend on the material being reviewed and the format of the activity. Peer tutoring can be implemented on an individual basis (one tutor and tutee pair), class-wide, or school-wide.

Peer tutoring is most effective with drill and practice activities rather than with the introduction of new information. With this in mind, the following are some ideas for implementing peer tutoring:

• Reading: reading books together, sight word practice (i.e., flashcards), writing a story together, completing reading comprehension tasks together, discussing assigned reading, etc.
• Math: practice math flash cards, solve word problems together, serialization tasks (tasks which involve a series of steps), etc.

With a little creativity on the part of both teachers and students, games and activities can be adapted to learning tasks for tutors and tutees.

Training & Support Information
In order to have a successful peer-tutoring program tutors need to be trained. Basing a tutor-training program on the following method has been shown to produce effective peer-tutors:

1. Positive verbal feedback: Teach your tutors the importance of positive verbal feedback. Prompt students to come up with a list of standard statements that are positively reinforcing. They also need to be taught how much positive feedback to provide. Teach tutors to give praise after every third or fourth correct response and after particularly difficult problems.
2. Corrective feedback: Teach tutors how to respond when an incorrect answer is given. When an incorrect answer is given, the tutor should promptly give and explain the correct answer without being critical, and then give the tutee an opportunity to repeat the correct answer.
3. Modeling by teachers: Model these behaviors for the tutors-in-training. Give correct and incorrect examples of how to provide positive and corrective feedback.
4. Role-playing between teacher and tutors: Role- play the tutoring process with each tutor, as both the tutor and tutee.
5. Role-playing between students: This is identical to the role-playing between teacher and tutors except that, in this step, the teacher observes and coaches tutors.

References & Additional Resources
Brophy, J. (1996). Working with shy or withdrawn students. ERIC Digest ED402070.

Conrad, E. (1974). Peer tutoring: A cooperative learning experience. Tucson: Arizona. Center for Educational Research and Development, University of Arizona. ED108 747.

Gartner, A, & Riessman, F. (1993). Peer-tutoring: Toward a new model. ERIC Digest ED362506.

Gaustad, J. (1993). Peer and cross-age tutoring. ERIC Digest, Number 79, ED354608.

Howard, W.L., Heron, T.E., Ellis, D.E., & Cooke, N.L. (1986). Teaching first grade peer tutors to use verbal praise on an intermittent schedule. Education and Treatment of Children, 9, 5-15.

Jorgensen, E.S. (1978). Cross-age, multicultural peer tutoring in an elementary resource room. ED153 419.

Tip Sheets: Positive Ways of Intervening with Challenging Behavior. Peer Tutoring. Available at http://ici2.umn.edu/preschoolpehavior/tip_sheets/peertutor.htm

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