This is exciting to me because I think that we expect this of
students that we expect them to be able to do this
automatically but we don't teach it to them explicitly
and so now what happened here in this classroom is evidence
that if we give them the tools they can actually do it and they can do it as
well or better than we can.
They rocked it, they really were able to do the self and peer-assessment in
meaningful ways and to learn from themselves
and each other. The teachers were focused less on teaching than on facilitating
learning
and the students stepped into that role
comfortably and gladly and they talk to themselves they talk to each other they
talk to the teacher.
They have a culture of critique in this classroom
and it's a constructive culture of critique. It's an intelligent culture of critique
and that's because the teachers put the tools in place
in this case the rubric and the Ladder of Feedback and
they taught the children how to do it. This is importan,t they've been doing
this
all year instead of just saying I think you need to fix such-and-such, you say
"have you considered" or "I wonder if"
or "one of my concerns is" this makes a huge difference and
all the kids spoke about that, they get it. They get it because they were taught
about the importance of it
but they also get it because they experience it and they can talk about
getting feedback from each other not
as being harsh but as being gentle and helpful. It wasn't about just judgment or
evaluation or even just
assessment in the typical sense of the word, it was about improvement. We've
talked already about the role of a constructive
critique, a protocol, the Ladder of Feedback or whatever Two Stars and wish
any kind of constructive protocol for peer feedback but the other key element
in
truly informative self and peer assessment is
standards and that can be
in the form of criteria checklists or rubrics or
how you communicate your standards to your students.
If they are grounded in the discipline then students and teachers
themselves know what the learning targets are
and they can all aim towards them but without a really clear picture of what
those goals are
all the lovely protocols in the world, no matter how constructive, no matter how
gentle
aren't going to do anybody any good because we don't know what we're talking about. So
you definitely need both those elements
you can do all kinds of things but you have to have that basic foundation of
what are my goals for my students and what is high quality
learning and work look like on this particular task. I know
from talking to them that a lot of teachers are very skeptical about self and peer assessment
that's partly because of misconceptions about what it really is
a lot of people hear self-assessment and peer assessment and think that students are
just going to go
grade themselves and each other and of course they'll give themselves
A's, they'll stroke their friends and they'll bash their enemies that's
absolutely true if what you do is ask them to grade themselves.
But that's not what we're asking them to do we're asking them
to give each other and themselves feedback based on standards of quality.
Completely different animals and you get completely different behaviors
if you ask them to grade themselves versus give themselves
feedback. So the most important thing if you're
curious about this at all is to keep in mind that this self and peer assessment is
really about feedback. The point is actually to get them to revise and
improve and deepen their learning and raise achievement, so why would you ask
them to grade themselves?
I don't. They have a beautiful community of learning in here
and there's mutual trust and respect.
Do you have to have that to start self and peer assessment, no.
You can get it through peer and self assessment. It takes courage
I think for teachers who aren't sure that their students will treat each other
well or even treat their teacher well. Start with the
piece of your curriculum with which you have confidence
and then define your learning targets,
create standards, create assignments you know that you have some comfort with
and then dive in with the self and peer assessment.
I have never met teacher who didn't
make a genuine commitment to trying self and peer assessment and then regretted
it. They
all love it, they try it, they stumble a little maybe, they try again they get
feedback from their peers, the other teachers about how to make it work
and it works. That's what I want people to know, that
there are all kinds of ways that it can fail
but they're far more ways that it can succeed
and students can actually do this and benefit a lot from it. It's fun to be
with a bunch of students who are academically, intellectually
engaged. That's a blast