Managing a Workshop Assignment

A Workshop Assignment is more complex than an ordinary assignment. It involves a number of steps or phases. These are

1. The assessment of the assignment should be broken into a number of assessment ELEMENTS. This makes the grading of an assignment less arbitary and gives the students a framework on which to make assessments. The teacher has the role of setting up the assessment elements thus making a grading sheet. (See that page for more details.)

   With the assessment elements set up the teacher will normally submit a small number of example pieces of work. These are practice pieces for the students to assess before preparing their own pieces of work. However, before the assignment is made available to students, these example pieces should be assessed by the teacher. This provides the students with not only examples for the assignment but also specimen assessments on those examples.

   The submission of example pieces of work by the teacher is optional and for certain assignments may not be appropriate.

2. The assignment is now opened to the students. If the teacher has set up example pieces of work the students can be asked to assess a number of these. In this case, the teacher must grade these assessments and the students must reach a satisfactory standard before they are allowed submit their own work. Here, a "satisfactory standard" has been set at 40%. Once a student has "passed" the required number of assessments they are free to submit their own work.

   When a student submits a piece of work the teacher can, if desired assess that work. This assessment can be incorporated into the student final grade. These assessments, if they are required, can take place either during the submission phase of the assignment or after the submission deadline.

   If the assignment incorporates peer assessment, students who have submitted work are shown other students' work to assess. When they have made an assessment their peer can see that assessment (but the other student cannot comment on it.) The teacher, however, can, if desired, grade the assessment and that score is taken forward towards the student's final grade.

3. After the deadline has passed, the teacher moves the assignment to the next phase where further submissions and assessments by students are not allowed. The teacher can, if wished, grade the peer assessments made by the students. This is not really necessary as provided a reason number of assessments have been made on each submission the "grading performance" of each student can be determined from the relative scores. The teacher now calculates the final grades of the students. These final grades are normally made up of three components, teacher's grade of the student's work, mean peer grade of the student's work and the student's grading performance. The last can include the mean "grading grade" entered by the teacher against a student's comments. These three components are given weights by the teacher before the calculation of the final grades takes place.
4. The final phase of the assignment is entered to allow the students to see their final grades. The teacher can, be desired, backtrack the assignment to allow some adjustment of, say, the weights used in the final grade calculation, the revised grades can then be shown to the students.