I have been reading your postings in critiquing lesson plans. It seems that some students do not understand what a good critique is. This critique criteria is posted in <Discussion Portfolios-Behaviorist Lesson Plan Crtique>. I now post it as a blog entry.
“Critique” refers to critical evaluation and constructive criticism. It requires a set of higher order thinking skills in constructing good critique – analysis, synthesis, and evaluation.
The quality of your contributions is evaluated on the grounds whether your contributions have the potential to improve your peers’ work. Postings like the example below do not warrant points (This posing came from a previous class).
"Good list and very thorough! It also made me think of using Excel with younger children. The very basic functions can be taught to them, then they will have some sort of foundation for later more involved uses. I really liked your learning activities - very creative!"
This posting gets a “0” for the following reasons:
1. This posting does not contribute to the peer’s project. How did the peer improve his/her work based on such a posing?
2. This type of posting does not require hard-thinking. It is easy to generate a comment like this. You do not even need to carefully read the original posting and I am sure that you do not need to perform any analysis in writing a comment like this.
3. This posing is generic. Try to replace the word “Excel” with “Powerpoint”, or “MS Word”. Now read the comment again. It reads just fine. To put it simply, this posting bears no relevance to the peer’s work it supposed to comment on.
