Unused resource

All teachers have an amazing resource in their classrooms. At times I find this is a resource to be neglected in some classrooms by the daily grind of trying to get through the content that needs to be covered by a certain point on the term. What am I talking about? KIDS!!!
Children are far more powerful at teaching each other than some people realise.
The other day I came cross some of the children in my maths class having a learning discussion about the strategy they had just learned. After discussing what they learned they realised that some people in their class were still having trouble. I asked them how they could tackle this problem and what they needed for me to provide to make the solution possible.
I came back to this group a little while later and found them having a great discussion about their learning. They were using materials in ways I hadn't thought of and at the end of the day every single person in the group understood how the strategy worked and when to use it. I could see right away who didn't understand the strategy we were covering and could ask questions to guide the children in the right direction. From there they explored the strategy further. I found that maths was the easiest subject area to apply this too to begin with but I'm working on applying this to reading also.
Here are snippets of the discussions I heard:

There is huge benefit in putting children into groups of mixed ability and getting them to teach each other especially because they will have different strengths, different view points about the same subject and different ways of thinking about the same problem. I found that it made the children who understood the problem think about it in different ways to make the children they were teaching understand what they were talking about.
So try it. Stand back and watch what happens when the children are left to teach each other. Its fascinating!