Practical things to try

With any new teaching strategies, I would recommend to start small, that allows you to safely implement an innovative approach like self and peer assessment in a practical way possible for you, perhaps in one of your low risk small cohort units or assessment tasks. One common scenario of introductory self and peer assessment is to design a formative task where students are given a set of criteria or rubric to evaluate their work and that of allocated peers work before submitting their final drafts to the teachers.

I have done this in one of my post-graduate units in the school of education, and this type of one-on-one self and peer assessment or review is common in postgraduate courses, especially where students are given a task to write for external outlets or audience, publication of journal articles, for example. So this activity sets up a practice run, so to speak, while also creating an opportunity to provide constructive feedback in improving their work among peers and with you, teachers through critical lens. It is also modeling the practice of academia in engaging with the peer review and feedback process. So it is an authentic task for those post-graduate students pursuing academic career.

Another strategy to success is to create a multiple of opportunities for self and peer assessment. Not once off for students, but also for you, so you can monitor and refine as you go, and you can do this over a course of a degree program, or even within a unit of study during a semester. Remember that involving students to evaluate their and peers’ work might be relatively new to them, as they’re used to having their work marked by their teachers, you.

So we need to ensure to provide enough opportunities for students to ask questions, clarify understanding, and refine skills to apply and reapply. As a case in point, group work online notoriously receives bad feedback from students. They don’t like it. Not only collaborating online presents some challenges, but also it is often because it’s designed in such a way that over the course of collaborating on a project, as a group for example, students only get marks on the end product, so group report or presentation, and no feedback or marks on the process of collaboration or teamwork skills. So the idea of free riders comes in here.

Research suggests that empowering students to evaluate on their transferrable skills that they are able to observe and evaluate, such as teamwork skills, rather than disciplinary knowledge and skills that students are yet novices on, makes a powerful learning opportunity. So a good practical example of self and peer assessment design over time is where students are given an opportunity to do a quick self and peer assessment, or evaluation on the rubric, every week during the course of a group task. Let’s say, six weeks. And the culmination of those small evaluations, in some cases scores, can add up to contributing to or individualising the group marks and feedback that the teachers give at the end of that group task. These weekly, quick evaluations can also become as a check-in point with students to clarify the process, reinforce the purpose, monitor any issues, and work towards refining, evaluative judgment, and feedback literacy skills over time.

Another way to build the confidence and capability in delivering self and peer assessment, especially when involving a new technology to facilitate is to involve your trusted colleagues to experiment together. Ask your peer teachers to set up a self and peer assessment task in modeling and practicing using the new tools and in fact their assessment strategy. Peer review of teaching as an example can be used as a mock self and peer assessment task in giving each other feedback on teaching practice among trusted colleagues.

This is a productive activity as it relates to enhancing teaching practices and guides the activity of constructing a rubric or set of standards that engage both yourselves as teachers and your colleagues as peers. You could do this over a course of a trimester, or even year in trying out and refining the way you exchange self and peer feedback on teaching practices. As this involves deep reflective practice teachers can end up creating their own ePortfolio of teaching practice and reflective journal. Which can be used for other purposes such as applying for Advance HE fellowships with the collected evidence and reflection.