On May 2, the IDP held an event featuring short excerpts from the American Radioworks documentary Don't Lecture Me: Rethinking How College Students Learn and Harvard physicist Eric Mazur's video Confessions of a Converted Lecturer. Both centered on the technique of peer instruction, a teaching method in which a question is posed to the class and then students are asked to explain their answers to one another.

After the excerpts attendees participated in a brief demonstration of peer instruction followed by a discussion. Topics included the appropriateness and applicability of this technique to library instruction, the kinds of questions that lend themselves to the technique (and the kinds that don't), the time-intensive nature of this and other active learning strategies, and the difficulties of inspiring student participation in activities that require the spontaneous formation of small groups. While no general consensus on any of these questions was reached, peer instruction is another tool available to library instructors that in the right context may be an effective active learning technique.