Table 1. Yale School of Medicine: Suggestions for Near-Peer Teaching*.

1. Near-peer teachers should be students who have recently completed the course. This provides enough cognitive congruence to facilitate the peer-to-peer learning process as well as sufficient incongruence in order to ensure that it is an instructional process rather than a purely collaborative process.

2. Near-peer teachers should be actively included in the design and implementation of the near-peer portion of the education curriculum.

3. Prior to the initial teaching session, near-peer educators should be oriented to areas that past students have found challenging and encouraged to provide input in areas that they themselves perceived as difficult.

4. A low teacher:pupil ratio should be maintained. In our case, the ratio was approximately 1:3; however, other studies of near-peer teaching have used ratios as high as 1:10 and 1:15 [13].

5. Individual educator and curriculum evaluations should be used to further the growth of the near-peer educators and assess the success of the near-peer curriculum.

*These suggestions were compiled from written and verbal feedback from students, near-peer educators, and faculty who participated in this pilot teaching program.