Framing Active Listening: Constructivist Tuning Protocol

by | May 13, 2022 | Risky Teaching | 0 comments

Peer Critique Protocol for PBL

Taking a risk on a new experience with students

I tried something really scary, with my Educational Technology in the Classroom students! I took a risk with teaching an instructional protocol that I have never taught before–it was inspiring, but complex in the number of steps that were required in the discussion rounds. I am hoping that sharing this post will not only help model peer critique as a strategy in the classroom–but also that debriefing new experiences with students is priceless for us as instructors, and for student metacognition. The video posted from this class demonstrates the kick-off/intro of the protocol, and the debrief session at the end. 

The Setting

My class was small, which helped a bit for logistics–there were only 8 students. All of the students were adults and consented to capture this activity for publication. For this activity, I broke students up into 2 groups of 4. The protocol I chose was the School Reform Initiative’s (2021) Constructivist Tuning Protocol. I was interested in the opportunity to explicitly teach active listening, an emotional intelligence skill that these preservice teachers will need in the field–and one that will help the peer critiques of their future final project. Students often get nervous about sharing work with peers, so having a chance to do practice strategies together, while reinforcing the idea of what kind of feedback is helpful was great timing. 
The protocol: step and goals
This peer critique protocol required me (as facilitator) to introduce not only the protocol, but also the skill we were practicing (active listening), and the success criteria that students were that group participants were supplying feedback about. Although the original protocol outlined a longer whole-group presentation, I made some time adjustments so that as many students as possible would be able to experience both presenting and listening, giving and receiving feedback. The protocol steps, as follows, were:
  1. The presenter will present their project to the class (4 minutes)
    • Others will actively listen, and take notes as needed
  2. The participants will get to ask any clarifying questions (1 minute)
  3. The participants will have time to prepare feedback (2 minutes)
    • Participants will write warm feedback (what worked) on pink cards.
    • Participants will write cool feedback (suggestions/recommendations) on green cards
  4. The participants will give the presenter warm feedback (2 minutes)
    • The presenter will actively listen
  5. The participants will give the presenter cool feedback (2 minutes)
  6. The presenter will have time to review cards (1 minute)
  7. The presenter will be able to respond to the feedback of choice (2 minutes)
The success criteria that participants were supplying feedback on were:
  • The presenter has clear goals for the project
  • the presenter can explain their creative process and design decisions
  • the presenter can talk about how the project meets (or doesn’t meet) their goals
  • the presenter can connect design decisions to pedagogical best practices.

Reflections on the process

The practice of using warm and cool feedback, much like Edutopia’s (2016) strengths and weaknesses protocol, helps students to really focus on feedback in the context of what success should look like. My hope for this experience was that it would demonstrate ways that students could support each other, when preparing project-based assessments, we often talk about assessment as being a conversation rather than a judgment. It was also important to me that students were able to practice giving and receiving helpful and specific feedback in a way that felt safe and active for all learners. These skills, especially active listening is difficult to master, as some of the conversations in the de-brief show.

Students did struggle to master task-switching, but they got better every round and were even able to question the rationale behind breaking up warm and cool feedback and draw it back t the benefit of active listening as a group. Although this experience did go a little bumpy—with both the new protocol and remembering to press the Zoom record to capture the class, it was an overall success. In fact, during the final project peer-pair critiques, students did reference back to this experience. 

References

Constructivist Tuning Protocol. School Reform Initiative. (2021, March 26). Retrieved from https://www.schoolreforminitiative.org/download/constructivist-tuning-protocol/

Critique Protocol: Helping Students Produce High-Quality Work. Edutopia. (2016, Nov.1). Retrieved from: https://www.edutopia.org/video/critique-protocol-helping-students-

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