Students Teaching Students: Learning Through Doing, Being, and Becoming

This paper describes a creative teaching strategy that may be used by occupational therapy educators. The strategy is illustrated through the learning experience of five occupational therapy students in Pi Theta Epsilon (PTE) who participated in a project which involved teaching first year occupational therapy students. With guidance from their faculty advisor, the students developed a lecture on Occupational Science and designed a pre and posttest instrument to measure the first year student's learning as well as their own performance and learning. Qualitative data from the five PTE students provided insight into their teaching experience. This project afforded an opportunity for the five students to apply and strengthen their problem-solving, interpersonal, and leadership skills, and teamwork. The doing aspect of preparing a lecture required various skills and knowledge that will benefit the students as future practitioners. The actual teaching of others allowed the students to experience being in the role of an educator. Such learning activities help to prepare students for their journey to becoming occupational therapists. (C) 2005 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.