Author(s):
Active student engagement is essential for student success in STEM, and collaborative learning spaces that provide opportunities for problem-solving with peers and near-peers (such as peer leaders) have shown additional benefits particularly for students who are traditionally underrepresented in STEM disciplines.The role of peer leaders acting as facilitators and role models in these collaborative learning spaces is key and peer leaders need to be carefully prepared and trained to tackle the complex task of facilitating discussion on challenging problems while mitigating barriers to student sense of belonging, engagement, and active participation. The Team Learning in Action (TLiA) project aims at equipping peer leaders with tools to identify, examine, and address common barriers to student participation and engagement in STEM collaborative problem-solving sessions. TLiA uses a combination of videos, assignments, and classroom activities to troubleshoot common student participation issues in teamwork presented through the perspective of students with a variety of backgrounds and needs. In this presentation we will provide an overview of the TLIA resource, the implementation and evaluation plans that we have adopted to test and assess its impact on both peer leaders and STEM students, and some of our findings. Throughout the presentation we will also highlight some of the challenges and opportunities we encountered in this process and our future directions.
