Peer to Peer learning is an order of magnitude more demanding that Do It Yourself learning. Peer to Peer learning requires coordinating schedules and locations, finding common ground, hashing out a shared vocabulary, accommodating mistakes and working through disagreements.
It’s only worth it if it’s also an order of magnitude more rewarding. Ensuring a greater return on your investment of time and trust calls for leveraging the power of minds working together. A few thoughts…
- Read the text to each other. Hearing the words as you look at them engages the mind in ways that reading silently may not. And hearing the emphasis your partner brings to a passage can challenge and enhance your perceptions about what’s on the page. It’s perfectly appropriate to say something like, “It seems like you emphasized some things by the way you read that passage. Was that on purpose?”
- Take the time you need. There’s no value in rushing through the content in order to meet an artificial schedule. There’s no sense in belaboring a point once you’ve got it. Decide together when enough is enough.
- Affirm each other. God gave each of you gifts and skills and talents and experiences that add value to the learning relationship. It doesn’t hurt to acknowledge those contributions from time to time.
- Pray for each other. At the very least, praying for each other creates a heightened awareness of our need for God—it’s a practiced awareness of God’s presence in the relationship. And, at the very least, people who pray for each other tend to look out for each other, seek to understand each other, work to support and assist each other.
- Consider teaming up to guide some others in the journey you’re on. What’s good for two or three may be equally good—or even better—for six or seven.
