Trading Power for Respect:
When Pupils Are Peers

When Chip’s son was a fourth-grader, he came home one day and announced that he had a new teacher assistant.

“Did your old teacher assistant leave?” Chip asked.

“No,” he replied, “Mrs. Greer is still there.”

“What’s your new teacher assistant’s name?” Chip asked.

Without looking up from kicking his soccer ball, he responded matter-of-factly: “Tommy.”

Chip instantly knew this was weird. Fourth-graders don’t refer to their teachers by their first names. Tenth-graders use teachers’ first names as an act of rebellion; twelfth-graders do it to sound grown up and cool. But most fourth-graders are not interested in being rebellious or cool.

As it turned out, Tommy was a sixth-grader and a part of a cross-age education effort to let older students tutor younger students. The concept was that elementary students often respond better to older peers than to a teacher, and placing teaching responsibility on the older students increased their growth as well.

Four months into Chip’s son’s experience, he asked how his son and Tommy were doing. “He’s not a helper anymore,” he replied. Chip decided to keep his mouth closed to see if he would fill him in. He continued, “Tommy thought he knew more about math than me. And when I started getting answers faster than he did, he got really mad. He started calling me names. Mrs. Greer heard him and took his job away from him.”

Peer mentoring poses special challenges no matter what the setting. Resistance is always an obstacle in mentoring, and it becomes especially acute when the mentor and protégé are peers. Most peer-mentors are painfully aware of how labels like “smart aleck” and “know-it-all” stick to those who profess to have wisdom they want to share. How do you make peer mentoring work when resistance so easily raises its ugly head? Hold that question while we consider another challenging situation.