Target the subjects with the greatest need, the "traditionally difficult subjects".

Book appropriate rooms and learning spaces, provide facilities that promote active learning tasks within the programme's timetabled framework that is sensitive to the life-commitments of the students.

Create a PAL leaders toolkit to help deliver meaningful and organised sessions, including cloud-based-storage repositories of material/activities and setup mobile smart technology for sharing and communications (e.g. Whatsapp or MS Teams)

Advertise for your Leaders: Create criteria for the role that includes confident, professional and capable PAL leaders. Be sure to "scope" the role; what is in scope for Leaders and what is not, to avoid ambiguity.

Prepare your Training:  bespoke training aligned to the tried-and-tested SI Training model that focuses on setting expectations, role-playing, modelling behaviours and facilitating team building. 

Promote early student ownership of the PAL initiative by incorporating the ‘student voice’ into the planning and preparation stages, acknowledging that everyone has something to offer and something to share. 

Interview & Recruit cross-year ‘near-peer’ PAL leaders with traits central to success such as academic ability, emotional intelligence, motivation and multilingual communication skills. PAL leaders that share the culture, experience, and life-journey of the students will be perceived as ‘model students’ to be emulated and trusted, and multi-lingual ability fosters greater inclusion. 

Train your PAL Leaders: this step is the most critical to a successful and long term PAL initiative. 

Promote PAL leader ownership by recognising, respecting, and trusting them with the role they are undertaking. Get them involved in planning early, given them scope to use their ideas.

Embed reflective practice into the core of the PAL structure by encouraging PAL leaders to critically reflect on behaviour as it happens.  Provide reflection templates and coach on the value of reflection. Gibbs Reflective Cycle can be a useful format to use. Reflection can also be useful feedback for the academic staff. 

Plan for sustainability by (where possible) re-using the accumulated experiences and bonds of trust that previous PAL leaders have developed by positioning them in the role of PAL Supervisor in future iterations to govern and guide the PAL leaders. 

Promote the inexistence, format and ethos of PAL among all students to encourage early participation and foster a social and inclusive ‘safe space’ for students to congregate.  Send out weekly reminder to students, and if necessary, monitor PAL attendance.

Empower the students to reflect and share their understanding and observations each week with each other in the PAL session and the supervisors/staff.

Step in and "observe" occasionally, but with a distance. Observation is just for constructive feedback and with the Leaders consent. 

Create Supportive Learning Communities by encouraging the use of multimedia capable mobile communication apps to expand a supportive learning community beyond the confines of the physical PAL sessions (e.g. WhatsApp, MS Tools, etc.), and let the students manage this.

Build a Community of Practice among the Leaders by encouraging them to share regularly and support each other. 

Check in regularly to ensure that the leaders are on top of their role and are facilitating discursive sessions with small group sizes that contributes to the formation of supportive learning communities and communities of practice that address barriers to inclusion. 

Address issues as they arise as this can help build confidence that the Leaders are supported. 

Check that PAL is delivering what you want:

• Built on a foundation of trust and friendship, the community of learners grows to support the students academically and socially within the PAL sessions and beyond it.

• Students begin to emulate the inspirational behaviours of the ‘near-peer model student’ PAL leaders, gaining advice and guidance that enables them to uncover the ‘hidden curriculum’ of course expectations. 

• Students consolidate the construction of new knowledge within the PAL sessions through different modes of learning and planned activities that promote critical thinking.

• Through the bonds of friendship nurtured in the PAL sessions they create a strong social network that will support them beyond the course.

• As each stage of the model is implemented, students begin to take more responsibility for, and ownership of the PAL sessions, moving from a facilitator-led implementation to one that is more student-led. 

Gather feedback from Leaders and students regularly, amend and improve the initiative year-on-year through "lessons learned" exercises.