Michael,
Others will no doubt have lots of good ideas on this. I recently implemented a “criteria for helping behavior” development exercise for the first class meeting, one of the first things students did after the
formation of teams.
I put on a slide a list of 5 behaviors that I thought were helpful, then asked the teams to come up with their own, giving them the option of creating their own or using some of mine. Following the same technique
as used in grade weighting, I asked the groups to send a rep to a central decision committee to make the final decision on the definition of “helping behavior” for the class. Their final list was a little longer than mine, as students’ criteria were more explicit.
When we did the midterm peer evaluation (formative only, no weight on the grade), these exact criteria appeared on their peer evaluation form. I was pleased to see that many students referenced them when they
provided feedback to one another. The same criteria appeared on the final peer evaluation.
Bill Roberson
University at Albany
From: Team-Based Learning [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
On Behalf Of Pollak, Michael
Sent: Thursday, February 02, 2012 10:23 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Peer Feedback Learning Exercise?
My students and I are all new to TBL and student peer feedback. I am aware of many of the potential problems that we might encounter with having students rate each other and would like to try to mitigate these issues by providing the
students with some guidance about the process. Before they complete the first set of peer evaluations of their teammates, I would like to have them complete a TBL application activity in class on giving effective feedback.
Does anyone have such an activity that they would be willing to share or can anyone point me to any resources to help me create my own?
Some context about my course. This is a course in Clinical Epidemiology with about 100 first-year medical students. This will be the first of two sets of evaluations. This first one will not count towards grade; the second set of evaluations,
which they will complete at the end of the course, will count towards grades. I plan to use the Koles peer feedback form that contains some rating scales and some written comments. I will not be formally rating the quality of the students comments.
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Michael Pollak, Ph.D.
Professor of Behavioral Sciences
Oklahoma State University Center for Health Sciences
918.561.8426