Section 6.3. Effective Workshop Practices

6.3. Effective Workshop Practices

The workshop is the most complex tool we've looked at so far. The extensive setup and management process can be daunting, which is why it is especially important to have a plan for how you will use the workshop before you start working. If you know in advance how you want the workshop to function, the important evaluation criteria, and how the students will interact with the submissions and with each other, you'll save yourself a lot of potential confusion later.

There are a few important decisions to make before you get started:

• How many instructor examples do you want students to practice on?

• How many peer reviews can you reasonably expect them to perform?

• How long will you give students to submit? How long to perform assessments?

• How will you control the quality of the student assessments, i.e., how will you prevent students from just giving each other A's?

• Do you want the workshop to focus on peer assessment or instructor assessment?

Once you've made these decisions, you have the beginning of a plan for your workshop. The last decision is critical in determining the shape of your workshop. I've been in classes where peer review was required but didn't influence the grade. I've also been in classes where peer assessment counted for half of the grade I received on a paper. It's important to decide this ahead of time so students know how much their peer ratings will influence the final grades.

If peer review is very important to the assignment, be sure to put measures in place to moderate student assessments. Plan on adding your assessment of a student's submission to the peer-review pool. This will help pull the average toward a score you think is reasonable without completely overriding the consensus view.

6.3.1. Creative Workshop Practices

Once you've mastered the basics of creating and managing a workshop, you can begin to use them in creative ways. I've detailed a few ideas below.

6.3.1.1. Intermediate steps

Writing, and many other creative processes, is an iterative endeavor. It takes multiple revisions of a work to make it the best it can be. Early in the process, it is useful to receive feedback from peers and experts about the structure and direction of the work.

To facilitate a continuous feedback process, consider setting up workshops for the intermediate steps in projects during the semester. For example, if students are writing an essay, you could set up a workshop for the topic proposal. Students could evaluate each other's proposals according to the dimensions you think are important. Later, they could submit outlines or early drafts for feedback as well.

For early work, you may want to make a student's grade more dependent on the feedback they give their peers than on the quality of the work itself. Later on, you could increase the value of the assessment of the work itself. Students won't have to submit perfect work right away, and the early grading and feedback on their assessments will help them calibrate their responses.

6.3.1.2. Presentations and performances

Most instructors use the workshop module to assess written work, but a workshop is not limited to just written assignments. Just like the assignment module, the workshop module can accept any electronic document smaller than the maximum upload limit. You could also submit links to media stored on other servers if a video or audio file is too large.

You can use the workshop module for peer feedback on presentations and performances. If students are required to give a presentation in class, you could set up a workshop for peer review and self-assessment. Students would submit their presentation slides or notes. The scoring guide could ask students to rate each other on both the live presentation and the submitted materials.

Randomly assigning assessments can be a useful motivational tool in this context. If students don't know in advance which presentations they will be required to assess, they are more likely to pay attention to all of the presentations and take good notes so they can articulate an informed judgment later.