Peer Evaluation: Part of effective groupwork, collaborative or cooperative, is evaluating the effectiveness of your peers and the group process. Cohen points out that students can be merciless when evaluating each other so parameters need to be set up and demonstrated to encourage students to give constructive feedback rather than just criticism. I think peer evaluation is great because it forces students to reflect on their own participation, other members' participation, and the overall effectiveness of the group so that next time they can see what they need to improve or what they did well. This would also be effective to share out with the class because some groups will do certain parts of the task better and then they can help other groups by sharing their own reflection.
In my content area I need to make sure I am planning time for group reflection and evaluation. I think groupwork is as much about the process as the product, if not moreso, and therefore it is important that students are allowed to critique themselves to improve their group performance.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Agreed. Way much more about the process than the product. To some extent I would say the same about most all of our content instruction as well. The process seems to speak about that development of the mind, ways of thinking... I have loose ideas about what this looks like in the study of social (uh...) studies. For example, Zinn & his pushing us to not only view the other histories of the world that aren't appearing in textbooks, but more importantly to learn to interrogate what information we are fed, and to ask what is the story that is not being presented? What is the Afghan war through a tribal elder?
ReplyDelete