Peer School

Goals:

• Further the general education of each member via peer developed content that emphasizes the presentation of material from members as much as it depends on the feedback and attention of the members.
• Include people from multiple backgrounds and disciplines.
• Encourage presentation from multiple forms and diverse backgrounds.
• Encourage the broadening of the entire group by approaching material outside of the expertise of all members.
• To improve all members communication skills, especially oral and written.
• To help professionals discover new ways of looking at their fields by presenting their knowledge to an interested group of non-experts.
  

Models of Success:

• Modern Marvels – Those guys can make anything interesting. Who knew that Saws and glue could keep me watching for an hour a piece?
• Socrates – The school of Socrates, where the emphasis was on communication, discussion, and the art of asking good questions. They had a deliberate disassociation from testing and measurement of achievement.
  

Keys for success:

• An active community of participants of which at least half of the people consistently present.
• Food & drinks.
  
• An openness and desire for members to be interested in learning.
• Its one thing to be interested theoretically, it is another to be so interested in the face of one’s other obligations in life. The more rewarding the experience is from the outset, and the more value people feel they are getting, the better the long term prospects are.
• A distraction free place for meeting.
• Whether this is some member’s house, or a common community room, it must be devoid of outside interferences that might suck away the attention span of the members.
• It may help to use varying and non-obvious meeting places to keep things interesting. Such as people's homes, coffee shops, park pavilions,
  
• A set of organization on discussions.
• Some people are naturally more aggressive than others in group conversations, and without some sort of organization on discussion, the more passive members may soon become disinterested entirely.
• Minimize the amount of work for non-presenters.
• Solutions to this problem might be to break apart a concept into a series of lectures of growing complexity on a given subject.
• Emphasize a balance on deep and broad explorations of a subject.
• If the material is too broad – then people may feel like the material is lacking in quality or substance.
• If the material is too deep – people may feel like the material doesn’t relate to them enough to be meaningful and they may not be prepared to absorb and collaborate or contribute.
• Balance safe subjects known to be interesting to the group, and subjects that may push the boundaries of people’s general areas.
• Meetings should always be recorded with audio for later review. Video is also highly encouraged
• Watching your own presentations is one of the best ways to improve weak points in your presentation skills.
• Collaborative Presentations are legitimate.
• If a group wants to work on a short film, or cover a topic in tandem, that’s perfectly reasonable.
  

Example Agenda:

• Start of meeting with an organizer making a few opening remarks. The point here is to mark a definite start of the meeting to encourage some organization.
• Open the floor to any willing presenters.
• Valid topics could include:
• A ‘day in the life of’ on your field of expertise.
• Make sure to cover as concrete examples as possible, and to try to distill what you normally do into the parts of which might be of most value to someone outside of your field, or which might offer the best insights into what it is that you do, and why.
• An in-depth covering of a topic that may be of common, but shallow depth of understanding for others.
• Try to give meaningful depth, and help others by including explicit ways in which the depth of the information ties into their lives in a way that the new knowledge has a good chance at being gainful.