An Example of Collaboration and Critiquing

A while ago I had planned to write about my class' first attempt at critiquing, but other things piled up and I never got around to it. We have been trying to critique our work though and something happened this week that made me think about how relevant this concept has become to my class (and how embedded some of my students are with the idea).

We have been planning and making a poster to share the learning we have done with circuits this term and last. I had divided up some jobs and given a group of students the task of making the title for the poster.

I sent them off to work watched them work together. My class has had a lot of experience working in partners or small teams and it didn't really surprise me that they I was hearing them discuss ideas for how we would write the word circuit. What did surprise me, however, was that they essentially started prototyping. They came up with their idea, drew a quick sketch and then, THEY STARTED ASKING OTHER PEOPLE for feedback. With no prompting they did this. And they kept doing it for at least five iterations of the drawing (shown below, albeit a bit faint since they used pencil). We've still got a few steps to go, but the process was actually quite interesting to watch. I'm very proud of them for how they did this - and the latest version does look pretty good.