Great Task Self Evaluation

I really liked the way we presented the great tasks today in that it was almost like a science fair where you go around and look at what other people have done. It was a little different for us since we were giving feedback on only two tasks but I still found time to look at other tasks that I was interested in. The points brought up in the discussion after were the most valuable because it reinforced the purpose and the value of using peer feedback for the students and the teacher. I was really curious about what was said about our task and how it could be made different. One of the best parts for me was the discussions we had when looking at the other tasks and how we each had different perspectives of what was done.
The challenge with doing this in a classroom with younger kids is that you have to put in a lot of time at the beginning to teach them how to give informative feedback. To make it useful for all of the students. I think this is valuable time to lose at the beginning in order to make great gains in learning in the end. I think that this is part of the challenge of inquiry work, that we have to teach the students in the beginning of how to do it and maybe that is why some teachers don't do it, because it's easier to do what the students are used to and not teach them how to learn in new and interesting ways. The first step with using peer feedback will be to make the classroom a safe place where the students feel that they can give their honest feedback, and to hear feedback from their peers.
Over all I really liked participating in the peer evaluations and I think it was useful for us. I think that we need to start teaching our students at a very young age of how to do peer evaluations so that those skills can grow with the students as they enter higher grades.