Johannes and Megan working with students together in classroom. From BMCC SI website.

In the summer of 2016, I was teaching scriptwriting at BMCC when I noticed my front-row students, who were invested in the class, did the homework, were responsive, and happy to be there, were suddenly automatically fielding questions from students further back in the classroom. The students up front were shouting back their responses from the front row, and they continued talking during the break. Instead of asking me, the reluctant students in the back asked their peers: “What’d she say? Say that again? What was that answer?” I had never seen that happen in all my years of teaching at NYU’s Film School, in the CUNY system, or abroad. 

A few months later, when the Fall semester began, I invited my ‘front row students’ into my scriptwriting class, but this time as “guest lecturers.” With my nomination, the pair of ‘front rowers’ had subsequently won the Time Warner script writing fellowships and were feeling good about themselves and very, very good about their writing. My writing students were rapt. Why? Because, just like the students in my summer session, they saw success right in front of them; the success of my front rowers was now their own, and it was within their grasp, a mirror of what could be their future in my course. I abandoned my teaching plan for the class and guided the students through the day’s lesson plan, but from the point of view of the front rowers, their fellow students who had already succeeded in the course. These previous ‘A’ students knew what was hard and what was easy, and were happy to spill about my hacks, my grading, and, dare I say, expose my weaknesses. It was peer-to-peer learning at its best, and the class ran over as if to prove it. 

I stopped by my chair’s office after class and mentioned something had happened in class that was new to me and that I thought we should act on it. Chris Stein said it sounded a lot like a program Dean Zummo in Academic Affairs was overseeing with the LRC. I did not have a name for what I had witnessed in my classroom yet, but when I explained it to Dean Zummo, she said I was doing SI, Supplemental Instruction…albeit without knowing it. She told me ‘SI’ was a kind of peer-to-peer learning; when a teacher chooses a student from a current previous semester to bring along to the next semester’s iteration of the same course to work as a student advocate in and out of the classroom. I had never heard of SI, but because I had witnessed it work firsthand, I was in. I attended BMCC’s SI program orientation that January told my story to the group at the Dean’s suggestion, and hired my two front-row students, AJ and Marcel, as paid SI Leaders. And, the great experiment began. 

At the orientation, I remember looking down at the calendar on my phone: January 2017. It wasn’t 1817 or 1917; it was 2017. My phone said we were in the 21st century, well into the digital age, 200 years since the golden age of the one-room schoolhouse and another century since the introduction of the 6-3-3 method. I decided change is good, and right then and there, I decided I was going to change the way I was going to teach. No more “Little House on the Prairie” school marm for me. I was going to invite SI leaders into my classroom. I could do this. 

I have been working with SI Leaders in my class ever since. Looking back now on five years of using SI leaders, I know I will never go back. Why? Grades are up, and so is retention, but I would really never go back to being that solo teacher in the front of the classroom. I prefer the noisy, happy, imperfect collaboration of working with SI Leaders who are closer in age and experience, and digital footprint to my students. What was at first a novelty has come to deliver over time. And it continues to work for my students and me because I was open to change and strongly believe in reciprocal learning. But most of all, I learned to listen closely to my ingenious, sensitive, and funny SI Leaders: AJ, Marcel, Kevin, Alex, Shanel, Andrew, Jan, Michelle, Andriy, and this semester Kejuan and Matthew. I know I will never return to being the only ‘teacher’ in my classroom.