ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the origins of learning by teaching, highlighting ideas from the educational philosopher John Amos Comenius. Additionally, it provides an overview of modern research on peer teaching. Until now, this research has been orientated toward either peer student learning or peer teacher learning, two separate yet crucial learning positions. In this chapter, a new argument is introduced, which claims that there is a need for a third learning position, termed “collective peer learning.” Furthermore, this chapter introduces a typology that can capture various peer teaching practices by distinguishing between formal and informal teaching, and the size of the student group. In this book, the emphasis is on formal peer teaching of the whole group, especially what is labeled as “same-level” collective peer teaching. This type of peer teaching let all students in the same group rotate on being peer teachers for each other.
