What educators teach is important, but how they teach it is essential. That’s the thesis that sparked Peer Learning, a research-backed social and emotional learning (SEL) pedagogy for delivering collaborative classroom learning experiences that shape positive behaviors for middle and high schoolers. Studies by the University of Oregon’s Center on Human Development proved that cooperative formats like “jigsaw” learning, peer tutoring, group projects, and peer inquiry significantly improved student outcomes, if used correctly. So the team asked us to create a platform that could facilitate these activities with advanced automation.

The PeerLearning platform gives teachers full visibility and control over the learning experience, enabling them to review or edit student matchups before launching an activity, or while it is in progress. The PeerLearning system also allows teachers to create their own activity groups, then checks them for potential matching issues and gives teachers the option to make manual corrections, or have the system fix the groupings for them.

The structure of PeerLearning activities promotes not only subject matter acquisition, but social and emotional learning as well (in alignment with the criteria defined by the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, or CASEL). For each lesson, teachers select a curriculum-aligned topic, and a SEL skill to target. Once the activity has been launched, the platform provides students with a description and examples of the target social skills. With Peer Learning directing the students through the activity stages, the teacher is able to move through the classroom to observe and reinforce the target skills in action.

Peer-to-peer activities can be used to teach a wide array of academic and SEL skills. We designed PeerLearning’s activity library to support the full range of the model’s flexibility. We worked with the research team and its pilot schools to compile hundreds of pre-programmed lessons, including general topics available to all users and specialized topics available to schools subscribing to an elevated user tier. PeerLearning also allows teachers to create their own custom lessons using any of the platform’s supported activity formats as a template.

Teachers don’t have much time to learn new tech tools, so working within their existing systems is essential for widespread adoption. We developed the PeerLearning platform to integrate with top learning management system Google Classroom, giving millions of teachers the option to sign in using their existing Google credentials, import their existing class rosters, and allow simplified student login through Google.