Thoughts on Teaching History in a Scale-Up Classroom (Part XII)

This is my 12th week teaching History 101: Western Civilization in the University of North Dakota’s new Scale-Up classroom. So far this semester, there have been weeks where everything works flawlessly and then there have been weeks like this week. At present the students have prepared drafts of chapters that they are writing for a new Western Civilization textbook. This “flipped” textbook approach has dragged the students through the intricacies of conceptualizing, organizing, and writing a textbook chapter. Each 9 student table is responsible for one chapter.

Over the past week, the students prepared two peer reviews of other chapters following a fairly simple template. In class, I simplified this template a bit further and asked them to bring their reviews together as a table. Once the reviews were circulated, I asked each table to respond to the reviews that they received.

The results of this exercise have been pretty ordinary. It reminds me of three issues with asking students to peer review.

1. Students don’t know how. They have no idea how to provide feedback to other students. They seem fixated on giving positive feedback and allergic to any sort of substantial critique. As a group, they contradict themselves, stumbled over obvious issues, and rarely produced anything approaching a cohesive criticism. Despite my efforts to push the students to prioritize their critiques, it was not entirely successful. In general, I think their peer reviews were just barely helpful.

2. Students struggle to embrace iterative work. In general, I have found that students like the idea of writing drafts, but they rarely enjoy or embrace the process. I suspect that too many courses in their academic careers treat graded assessment as the final result of their efforts rather than part of the process. As a result, students do not regularly engage with comments and see them as a way to improve a work. This rather alienated attitude toward comments undermines the fundamental ideas of peer review and the process of working iteratively through drafts.

3. Value. Most scholars are motivated to write good and thoughtful peer reviews because they have received and benefited from good and helpful reviews. Moreover, most of us buy into the larger project of academia in which peer review is a key element. Students rarely have experienced the benefit of peer review (and many of them may not even read the comments on their work) and certainly do not buy into many of the basic commitments of academia.

Knowing these three things, I still failed to incentivize the peer review process and the results were predictable. The exercise was treated as perfunctory and the results were uneven. More than that, an exercise that I anticipated would take 40 minutes per chapter (i.e. 80 minutes over the course of the class) took about an hour total. I had to scramble during the second half of class to keep the tables moving forward in editing their chapters and, for the first time all semester, I had to ask the students to fix work that they produced in class.

The solution to the peer review issue is, as always, carrot and stick. The stick is making the peer review a major part of the student’s grade. The carrot is to encourage students to buy into the peer review process as an opportunity to understand the strengths and weaknesses of their work and fundamental to academic life. Last night, I missed on both.

For more on my adventures teaching in the Scale-Up Classroom, go here.