Caroline Woolard facilitating a peer circle with a group of people sitting around a shared table.
Image Credit: Photo courtesy of Pollinator

If you have ever participated in a book club or study group, played sports, or used a web forum, you’ve engaged in peer learning.

While peer circles are widely used in corporate and educational contexts, their value to nonprofits and community organizers is underappreciated.

Peer-to-peer circles emphasize exchanging knowledge and skills between individuals of similar status or experience. Unlike traditional top-down models, peer-to-peer circles are often informal, collaborative, and based on the idea that everyone has valuable knowledge to share.

Peers who learn something new together often explain concepts better than experts because they use relatable language and understand their peers’ perspectives as newcomers to the concept at hand. Experts often overcomplicate lectures with jargon and references that may not be culturally relevant to the people they are trying to teach. A study of the experience of 900 students at one of the largest medical schools in Germany, Ludwig Maximilians University, found that participants in peer teaching scored higher in biochemistry examinations than nonparticipants.

While peer circles are widely used in corporate and educational contexts, their value to nonprofits and community organizers is underappreciated. Here we want to share what we’ve learned about peer circles over a combined 40 years and offer some suggestions for how they might be used today.

Discipline-Specific Peer Circles

Peer circles are so common that they are often not even named as such. Indeed, every discipline has informal and formal institutions and social protocols where individuals learn from one another. But before moving to organizing peer circles, it’s valuable to look at how peer circles have been used in different sectors.

In the arts, for instance, peer circles often take the form of critique groups. In critique groups, artists share works, either completed or in progress, and the group offers feedback. The Inklings of the thirties and forties were a long-running writers’ critique group that included J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. The Inklings met weekly to critique each other’s writing and encourage each other in writing fantasy. A critique group offers artists a chance to understand how a reader or viewer responds to a work.

In corporate contexts, peer circles are often called peer groups or peer coaching. This format emphasizes readiness, performance, and the importance of inquiry. Peer coaching helps individuals solve problems while fostering a collaborative, interdependent learning environment. It also allows agile sharing within and across departments.

In the sciences, peer circles can be a “lab collaboration” or multi-institutional cross-disciplinary translational teams (MCTTs). Recently, three US universities teamed up to propose research into long COVID-19 using an MCTT approach. This approach is fairly new and still being developed, but advocates say it promises to advance scientific work more rapidly than siloed individual teams.

In public health, “peer support” programs reduce social isolation and connect patients and caregivers with others facing similar health challenges, including addiction and recovery. Peer support groups share personal experiences with the same condition, providing practical advice on self-care and guidance in navigating the healthcare system. Participants benefit from engaging with peers who have successfully managed their conditions.

“Peer instruction” (also known as “peer learning”) in educational settings can be as simple as having a space where students can discuss an idea or principle together. Harvard University’s librarian Odile Harter suggests peer learning can lead to improved learning outcomes, allowing peers to explore teamwork and collaborative argumentation and, in the process, tackle complex information-dense problems that would overwhelm an individual. Many studies have shown that peer learning can be more effective than traditional instruction because a student who has just learned a concept is better suited to explain the concept in ways that a peer can understand.

Peer circles require adaptation based on context and mental models, but the common denominator is a desire to benefit from social interaction while learning or “social cognition.” The ways that peer circles can be designed are almost endless.

How to Set Up a Peer Circle

Creating a peer circle is typically specific to the field and topic of focus. Regardless, any effective peer circle must first establish trust by offering practices that build strong relationships and create a space where peers feel safe enough to express their opinions and challenge the group to consider new ideas.

Peer circles also require that a person or people take responsibility for the group by inviting participants, making a structure for participation, and doing the logistical and coordination work to ensure everyone knows when meetings are happening and how to show up. Below is a basic framework for establishing a peer circle adapted from The Pedagogy Group, a peer circle for arts educators in New York City that ran weekly from 2012 to 2019 and in which author Caroline Woolard was a member.

  • Get started: Gather a group interested in using peer learning and support to explore a specific topic. Commit to regular meetings. Find a place or platform and a time for meeting. A typical meeting length is two hours.
  • Establish group roles and guidelines: Set clear guidelines for participation, communication, and mutual respect. Use facilitation to ensure everyone’s voice is heard and valued. Determine the group’s specific focus or themes. If meeting in a physical space, make sure it is comfortable for all participants—with amenities like food and drink provided by members. Prioritize accessibility. Keep meetings informal and relaxed to encourage open dialogue and connection.
  • Organize inclusive meetings: Begin meetings with a check-in, where each member shares personal updates, challenges, and successes. You can use a simple framework like “rose, thorn, bloom” (something positive, something difficult, something hopeful) or let people share in their own way. Close out each meeting with time to check on progress toward the group’s goals and to identify any homework people might need to do before the next meeting.

Beyond that, meetings can be varied. Some potential agenda structures include:

  • A focus on collaborative work (such as group writing, presentations, and problem-solving exercises)
  • Group activities that foster learning and creative expression
  • Guest-led discussions
  • Spontaneous, free-flowing discussions without a set agenda

A major advantage of peer learning over traditional one-on-one mentorship is relational skill building—peers can witness and coach each other.

Why Circles Matter

In a 2020 report, Mahnaz Charania and Julia Freeland Fisher of the Christensen Institute wrote that “just like skills and knowledge, relationships offer resources that drive access to opportunity [emphasis added].” We know resources are unevenly distributed. Research suggests that peer groups, by fostering diverse connections across differences, can empower participants to solve challenges more effectively and more rapidly than they might do on their own.

Martin Pettis, a member of the advisory council for Pollinator, a platform for peer circles, tells us that “the world doesn’t need another platform; it needs pollinators—something fluid, alive, and relational.” Circles, he adds, foster “interconnection, cross-pollination, and shared growth.”

A major advantage of peer learning over traditional one-on-one mentorship is relational skills building—peers can witness and coach each other through individual relational difficulties.

That said, the very strengths of peer circles are also some of their core challenges. Establishing a culture of trust and safety can take time and effort. There are no shortcuts to building trust, but there are tested approaches.

The deep trust generated by peer circles also offers a tool to combat disinformation. Social media platforms’ algorithms encourage viral behavior that stokes outrage. In this environment, misinformation spreads quickly, especially as tech companies remove already inadequate safeguards.

In contrast, peer circles can create safer, more supportive spaces where individuals share authentic perspectives and build deep connections. These relationships and conversations facilitate the sharing of researched information in a more reliable, personal context. Since peer circles focus on collective learning and dialogue, they can also provide a sense of accountability and correction in real time.

Making Circles Last

A challenge with peer circles, however, is that the time spent organizing and holding meetings can lead to burnout. As Etienne Wenger-Trayner, a leading theorist in the development of peer circles and “community of practice” has written, “a key success factor [for a community of practice] is the dedication and skill of people who take the initiative to nurture the community. Many communities fail, not because members have lost interest, but simply because nobody has the energy and time to take care of logistics and hold the space for the inquiry.”

Cohorts in schools and residencies usually engage in both formal and informal peer circles that develop relationships, but after the program ends, there is a void. Alumni often attempt to stay connected, but most do not have the capacity to develop a structure around extended relationship building.

Peer-to-peer learning can thrive in various settings, unlocking a more collaborative and supportive approach that can advance practice in nonprofits.

Social media could, in theory, extend the longevity of peer circles. Both social media and peer circles share many positive qualities, including facilitating group communication and a sense of belonging. But social media interactions typically lack the accountability, depth, and active listening that are at the heart of peer circles.

Is it possible to design digital platforms to encourage deep relationships of peer circles and help solve logistical difficulties—while avoiding the negative effects of larger social media platforms? Pollinator, a group that Woolard leads, is launching a 2025 pilot attempting to do so.

Specifically, Pollinator is working to create a digital platform that will foster communication among alumni from prestigious fellowships internationally. The curriculum and platform will engage curated alumni groups over a five-week arc, using digital prompts for listening and feedback. The lessons learned from the Pollinator pilot will be applied to future tools for platform-enhanced peer circles.

Coming Full Circle

Peer circles provide an accessible and powerful model for collaborative learning across a range of fields. However, as with any group-based model, peer circles face challenges, particularly around trust-building, logistics, and avoiding burnout.

Despite these hurdles, peer circles spark innovation, support personal development, and create a sense of belonging. With the right structures and commitment from participants, peer-to-peer learning can thrive in various settings, unlocking a more collaborative and supportive approach that can advance practice in nonprofits, community organizing, and beyond.