Parvin Peivandi, IB Reflection, October 16th, 2014
In the IB seminar this week, I had chance to show my IB journals to one of my classmates: Rachael. I asked her to write some notes for me about the IB reflections that she reads and her feedback was really helpful. She highlighted the strengths of my IB reflections such as: great questions, use of IB vocabulary, thoughtful observations, great connections to other courses and my real experiences. She noted also few grammar mistakes.
Reflecting on this experience in our IB seminar,I found peer feedback assessment as a strong educational tool that I can use more in my future classes. As I have learned in human development and psychology course, Scaffolding is a technique that I can use to empower the students in need by the help of their peers. Now, peer feedback is another scaffolding technique that I can use in my IB pedagogy. Due to the challenging and rigorous nature of IB education, I believe more assistance and modification strategies should be considered in unit lesson plans such as peer feedback, formative assessment in the form of teacher’s feedback and also rubrics with student friendly language.
The idea of making the language of our education student friendly was amazing too. Few years ago, I have experienced a hard time as a student in some of my classes in which the teacher was teaching with a complicated language and challenging vocabularies. Also the speed of the presentation is an important factor that has a huge impact on the student’s learning. Also, I remember in our teaching methodology class at UBC, how one of the previous graduates of UBC talked about her mistake in delivering materials fast and in a complicated language that made her class fell behind the curriculum.
With all of these useful hints, there are some great questions here: How long should be devoted to peer feedback in each unit plan? What should be the criteria of successful, unbiased peer feedback? How should I make as a rubric for peer feedback to guide the students? What should be concluded, what not? And why student friendly language is so important in teaching technical vocabularies in art classes? What visual elements should be added to rubrics for the ESL students?