Blog Post # 3

How Can You Provide Meaningful Feedback to Your Peers?

Feedback is an essential tool used by professionals in every career you can think of, especially teaching. How can anyone expect to grow if they are never shown how effective their methods are when completing tasks within their profession? Evaluations, assessments, scores, critiques and the like are useful when judging the work of another. The trick is to evaluate with tact. Professionalism demands appropriate use of feedback, so as not to offend, in order to guide the individual to conclusions about how to improve. As teacher’s we will be called to evaluate the work of our students as well as our peers, so it is very important to get the message across without being hateful or trying to embarrass those we are critiquing. Paige Ellis states in her blog about the topic,

“Like communication, to be effective, it takes practice to master this skill.”

http://ellispaigeedm310.blogspot.com/2011/07/blog-assignment-12.html

To find out more about providing meaningful feedback to your peers, students were asked to view some very informative links. In the simple presentation by nrpatric, Peer Editing, our memory is refreshed on the responsible way one must approach editing our peers using, “suggestions, comments, compliments and changes.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yXerR7O-Lc&feature=player_detailpage

Another resource listed was Adriana Zardini, who presented a slide show on peer editing. The author reminds us to “Always start your peer editing with compliments!” a very important positive approach to evaluating writing. In the teaching profession, starting an evaluation off on a positive note is a method that should be practiced repeatedly. Students, parents and peers will be more open to whatever message you are trying to convey after you compliment them on their accomplishments. http://www.slideshare.net/aszardini/tutorial-peer-editing-113187

Lastly in the video by Tim Bedley’s students, Writing a Peer review (Peer Critique) Top 10 Mistakes, there are ten scenarios presented for ways in which mistakes can be made while reviewing writing. The short film illustrates negative styles for critiquing. Students are pretty convincing as they act out all the ways reviewers can be cruel, inappropriately critical and ineffective while judging the quality of each others writing. As a final note, when you judge another persons work, do so in a respectful manner, they will reciprocate your kindness and should learn from their mistakes. Evaluations are essential but kindness is key. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBuq4qgRhCc&feature=player_detailpage