Date: Wednesday, September 7th, 2016
Unit: Assignment #2
Lesson: Constructing a class-wide standard for peer review and finishing peer review before Assignment #2 is due

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This lesson plan is for September the 7th towards the end of Unit 2. It was centered around perfecting peer review with my class after the rather clumsy first day of peer review, as observed by my teaching mentor Amy Walton (the reflection of my mentor’s observation can be seen here). Needless to say, as rough as that last class was, this one was much more successful. I think, going ahead, I’m going to adapt this kind of peer review style since it ended up achieving such good results from my students. To elaborate, on the 2nd, I had my class collaborate for peer review with minimal guidance and in large groups (about 7-8). I did this in order for students to share out the beginnings of their work with as many of their peers as possible. However, this quickly led to chaos and I had to run about the classroom stoking the fires of flagging conversations.

 
Seeing the class of the 7th of September in action, however, I can confidently say that it was the large number of group members during the last session that allowed students to quietly sit secluded from the rest of the group and remain quiet. So, when the conversation turned their way, they were unprepared and shy, thus stalling whatever conversation may have been limping along. With this new system of smaller groups, all of my students ended up holding good conversations while conducting their reviews. In fact, as often as I was trying to stoke the fires of conversation during my class on the 7th, for this class I couldn’t get to my students quickly enough to listen in on their great conversations. Earlier, I had said that I want to still use this two-day peer review session idea in the future and I think there was still some merit to my class on the 2nd. My students focused on their ideas, rather than the nitty-gritty of sentences, organization, and argument coherence. Granted, keeping the groups small for either session will be key, but splitting it up into two class periods could be just the ticket to more product review sessions.

 
Something that I’ve skirted around up until now is perhaps the most vital part of the whole class period and something that helped to inform my ideas moving forward. Additionally, it’s on display here on this eProfile. Before the peer review began, I asked the entire class to contribute, in a freeform discussion/forum kind of way, to an impromptu reflection chart showcasing all of the positive and negative aspects of the previous peer review session and what we want to see going forward/what makes good peer review. Placing this up on the board, created by all of the student’s ideas, rather than just my own, not only helped me create my own refinements to my lesson plans for the future, but my students also had a set of criteria they created themselves; through their own intuition, they dabbled in self-determination and, with their chosen positive and negative attributes up on the board during the class, their minds were more focused in their smaller groups.

 
So, in all, I think that this class not only went immeasurably better than my previous one but also set a precedent for coming peer review sessions. Also, though I’m not sure how often I’ll get the chance to indulge in this idea, but I would love to see my students experiment more with this self-determination and autonomy so they take more of their learning into their own hands.