Shools need Shills

Casinos, and less reputable organizations (like marketers), regularly employ shills: people playing the game not for fun, but to keep the game going if there are too few players, and/or just to ramp up players' enthusiasm. One could get into a heavy discussion of whether a shill is actually "playing" the game at all (the term shill usually implies playing with house money, not keeping any winnings), whether the presence of shills implies a metagame around the original game, etc.

But my question is this: if shills are effective enough that casinos use them, why don't we use them in classes?

Consider the (unsubstantiated - send me references!) truisms:

• a few good students can enhance the learning environment for everyone else;
  
• peer regulation is the most effective enforcement of classroom discipline;
  
• students ask questions in classes that other students are asking questions in;
  
• students won't do what you tell them to, but will model themselves after peers that they see as successful.
  

Imagine you could plant a student who would ask the poignant question of the day, who would patiently help the struggling student while you addressed the rest of the class, and who would be your eyes and ears in the back of the room. Imagine a student who could ask probing but answerable questions of the strong students, credibly asking for help.

Sure, some of these tasks could be done with a TA, but a shill _models desired behavior_, and the only person better than a shill would be an actual role model student. And there's not enough of those for every class. Maybe because not enough students had a shill show them how to be.

I just told my differential equations class to read a section in the book and teach it to me next time. Which they took as a joke, but might actually make a decent exercise. But it got me to thinking -- what if they _always_ had someone to teach to, asking all the right questions?

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