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Learning Circles

This training provides skills that will be useful in any peer-facilitated, in-person learning environment such as discussion groups and community conversations. Learning circles are one specific approach to organizing learning, and they provide a good model for any other approach that you come up with to meet your community’s learning needs.

Welcome to P2PU

Peer 2 Peer University (we mostly say P2PU) is a grassroots organization whose mission is to create alternatives to formal education that are both practical and liberating. Our primary project is called learning circles, which are groups of people who meet in person to learn something together, using free online courses or other learning resources.

We are a small team, but learning circles have reached six continents (one day, Antarctica, one day…) because we are an open source and grassroots project. This means that anybody can freely adapt learning circles to their context and also contribute to our work. One way you can contribute is letting us know what you think about this course when you’re finished with it!

Underlying our work is the conviction that learning is a social activity. We believe that every person develops expertise through their own life experiences, that people learn when they share and connect with others, and that feedback is necessary in order to improve.

So by convening a group of people who are interested in a similar topic in a learning circle, you’ve got the basis for an open, collaborative learning environment. Learning circles can create a rich learning environment in which everyone simultaneously teaches and learns, acts and observes, speaks and listens. This exposes people to new perspectives, provides an opportunity to develop useful social skills, and allows individuals to achieve something greater than they could have on their own.

What is a learning circle?

Most simply, a learning circle is a group of people who meet to work together on a common topic. Every learning circle has a facilitator, whose job is to help keep things on track. This person is not, however, expected to be a content expert. Rather, they should feel comfortable with the learning circle model, serving a role that is closer to a party host than a university lecturer.

Learning circles usually meet for 90 minutes/week for 6-8 week, but this is flexible depending on the course and your goals. Generally, we find that learning circles shorter than 4 weeks don’t have enough time to form a group culture, and learning circles longer than 8 weeks can be alienating due to the time commitment.

Learning circles work best with between 4-15 participants, though this is also flexible. We find that if you have less than four people or more than 15 people, it’s difficult to create a strong peer learning environment, which adds more burden on the role of the facilitator.

Here are some slides for you to click through that explain a bit more about P2PU and learning circles, introducing the four key components of every learning circle meeting: check in, coursework, group activity, and plus/delta.

What Does P2PU Mean?

Curious about where P2PU gets its name? Look at the pictures below of two different types of computing networks. One of them is a client/server network, and the other is a peer-to-peer network. Can you guess which is which?

Two computing networks

A client/server network consists of individual nodes (clients), who request services and resources from a centralized server, whereas a peer-to-peer network consists of interconnected nodes (peers), which share resources amongst each other without the use of a centralised administrative system.

If we take away the computers, we can imagine how these concepts relate to learning and education. In the first instance, all information is mediated through a central repository; there is no way for people to communicate directly with one another (sort of like a lecture). In the second instance, knowledge is distributed among each person, allowing for unlimited sharing within and between communities.

Further Reading

Want to understand more about P2PU before you go forward? Read about the history of learning circles, meet some existing facilitators, and familiarize yourself with the P2PU website by visiting the Orientation Section of the P2PU facilitate page.

What does it look like?

Here is a picture of a group of kenya librarians sitting in circle using computers

Learning circles follow a method: check in, coursework, group activity, and plus/delta.

Check-in

A good first meeting usually starts with check-in, goal setting, and expectations for the group involvement (homework/no homework?). Saying right at the beginning, too, that learning circles are different than a class and that everyone is here together to support each other, sets a good tone for the rest of the learning circle meetings.

Coursework

The majority of each learning circle is devoted to working through the online course. Depending on the course and week, course work can be run individually, in small groups, or as a large group gathered around a single computer or projector.

Activity

Sometimes group activities emerge naturally from the online course, but if you’re looking for a more intentional approach, we have created some group activities which you can use to support peer learning and bridge the gap between the online course and real life.

Plus/Delta

To close each week, everybody shared one thing that went that day (“plus”) and one thing to change for the next week (“delta”).

Activity: Anybody can learn anything

Anyone can learn anything slide

When learning circles began in 2015, something we heard a lot of edtech companies say was that “anybody could learn anything, anywhere, for free” and that online learning would “democratize the world”. While these are nice sentiments, they are also very naive, because they don’t account for the very real barriers that many people face to learning.

There are both individual barriers (digital literacy, awareness of opportunities, and academic confidence) as well as structural barriers (racism, financial injustice, monolithic ideals of what constitutes “knowledge”) which prevent many people from being able to take full control over their own learning experiences.

One way to dig into these barriers to to revise this sentiment to make it more realistic.

Here’s how you play:

  1. Open this Google Slide and either make a copy or download it as a Powerpoint presentation so you can edit it.
  2. Read the slide out loud - how would you edit it to make it more accurate in your community?
  3. Have one person edit the sentence in real time. As the text gets longer, decrease the font size so that everything is still visible on a single slide (you may have to do this more than once).
  4. Add your slide in a comment to this thread! You can do that by taking a screenshot and uploading it as an image, or by pasting the link to your Google Slide (if you do this, make sure that you set permissions so that anyone who has the link can view).

Here’s what others have come up with:

[Repurpose content from:

Up next: Plus Delta

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