Peer learning is what happens in the world of work.
Here's the quick story as to why I understand this idea of peer learning.
When I started my career, there were people who were actually called secretaries.
And they actually filed things, they actually typed things.
20-25 years ago there were actually people called bosses.
They didn't have jobs. They actually bossed. Bossing was their job.
Managing was their job, leadership was an art they did.
Things change too fast today. So now bosses are people who
tell you once a year what they want done, hope you figure it out the rest of the time,
and expect you, I mean expect you, to learn how to do it from everyone else around you.
So the ability to learn from others is a core competency of success in the business world.
It's the most important thing people in business do today.
And it is so not talked about, it's so not well understood.
And yet such a core competency we should be gifting all of our students,
if at all possible, to feel good about and understand how important it is.
So that's why peer learning is an essential part of a curriculum process.
As you have people passing through their four or how ever many years
we have the opportunity to work with them here at Western Washington,
so that they understand that this is a skill they'll be using for the rest of their lives.
Students are expected to put on the shoes of someone that I know
because I'm a marketing person, they're going to have to work with
for more in their careers than they may imagine.
The essence of understanding diversity as I have learned it
through professional life, is to understand where somebody else is coming from.
And the best way to do that is to be asked to take on the mantle of someone you are not.
And so that part of the exercise is, number 1, highly realistic, and number 2, very helpful.
it is a skill, the writing of a creative brief with a branding essence
as the core learning experience, is one of the most important
fundamental skills that most students in the marketing profession will need,
and they need it quickly.
I've received emails as quickly as day 2 of someone on the job
at a major firm, who wrote back and said, 'Oh my God, I just did the creative brief exercise.'
It's probably one of my most treasured emails,
because that was my validation moment that it was really a core skill
I think the biggest thing I learned from this is how this experience
or this creative brief, the assignment itself, is a real world experience for us,
because my sister is an account executive, and I was talking to her about
'Oh, I'm doing this creative brief assignment. We have to go speak to creatives,
it's a role playing assignment. And she was like, 'Yeah I do that.
I do that in my job. So I think it's really great that professor Stone
could bring a real world situation into the classroom.
And that's where it's directly applicable to real life,
And I think that's what I learned out of this. The biggest thing I would say.
I love the fact that students provide feedback to one another.
Number 1, because I think it's a better learning experience,
but number two, because that's how the the world of work works today.
360 degree feedback has become a norm.
And I know how much that is a challenge for people
who have never been asked to provide feedback to one another.
There's also a particular quirk within the marketing profession
which makes peer feedback so important. The output of a creative brief
is what most of us would think of as a commercial or a bus stop ad,
or a really cool radio commercial or a fabulous video on YouTube.
All of those things are the output of this process.
And when you ask someone to give their heart and soul to create that beautiful ad,
that we all resonate to, that's really the output of lots and lots of false starts
that didn't go so well. The only way you get great output in a marketing profession
is to be able to give good feedback, and be able to receive good feedback.
And that means non-defensively, with deep respect for one another,
and this exercise, to a large degree, emulates that and has worked successfully in that way.
One of the hardest things for me was reviewing my peers.
Sitting there as a creative, watching others perform, knowing how hard it is
to put together a presentation and then when you go back and reread
it's just, 'what was I thinking?' They put so much time into it.
And it's the regret. I think that's the hardest thing ever. (Grading your peers.) It was horrible.
We had to grade them in terms of relevance though,
which was actually one of the main take aways from the class.
Making it relevant. Making everything you do relevant.
So it was a chance to get true feedback without having our career at stake,
without losing the project, and that's great.
Still stressful, but great. - Well the grades were at stake.
That's another thing I forgot to mention is that you are also
getting all this feedback. You're not getting feedback just from the professor,
which is usually how it is. You're getting feedback from 35 people,
in which everyone has a unique perspective.
It's abundantly more clear how you did, your strengths, your weaknesses,
your presentation, because of all this feedback that you get.
It's unbiased, it's objective, and very often it's very honest,
and so long as you incorporate it into your strategy as a marketer
and to your thought process, learning process, it's great.