Why Team-based Learning Matters
Team-based learning involves students working in small, accountable teams to achieve common learning goals. Team-based learning can enhance students’ engagement, motivation, and collaboration, as well as develop their critical thinking, problem-solving, and communication skills. In short, it can help prepare students for the real world. And doing Canvas peer review, if your course is in the Canvas LMS, can make it more impactful.
Team-based learning does pose challenges, such as ensuring that all team members contribute equitably, provide constructive feedback to one another, and resolve conflicts. To navigate these challenges, team-based learning requires frequent and systematic peer review, which is the process of giving and receiving feedback on team tasks from other team members.
How Peer Reviews Help
- Improving the quality of team work: Peer review helps team members identify their strengths and weaknesses of their teamwork, such as the organization and presentation of their ideas, leadership capabilities and overall professionalism. Peer review can also help team members improve their teamwork by providing constructive criticism. Instructor oversight is key for the last part.
- Enhancing the learning of team members: Peer review can help team members learn from each other, as they can gain new perspectives, insights, and knowledge from their peer feedback. Peer review itself can be a learning experience, as documented in this 2015 study.
- Fostering the development of team skills: Peer review can help teammates develop teamwork skills, such as communication, collaboration, and conflict resolution. Peer review can help team members communicate effectively, as they can practice giving and receiving feedback in a clear, respectful, and constructive way. Peer review can also help team members collaborate effectively, as they can share their ideas, opinions, and feedback with their peers, and reach a consensus on their team work. Peer review can also help team members resolve conflicts effectively, as they can address any issues or disagreements that arise from their feedback, and find solutions that satisfy all team members.
Using the Right Tool: Feedback Loop Canvas Peer Review Plugin
Feedback Loop is designed for easy and impactful peer review with its Canvas peer review plugin. Everything works within the Learning Management System (LMS) and sending peer review repeatedly throughout a course, as is advised to maximize its impact on learning, is simple with our survey templating feature.
Sharing the results of peer feedback with students maximizes learning impact but is nearly impossible to do manually. Feedback Loop empowers instructors to do this efficiently: results can be reviewed and then released back to students for an anonymized, personalized performance report for each student.
Feedback Loop integrates smoothly with Canvas, a leading learning management system (LMS) that helps you create and deliver engaging teamwork-based courses including online courses and in-person scenarios. By using Feedback Loop’s Canvas Peer Review Plugin, you can:
- Create custom, resusable Canvas peer review survey templates that can be shared across instructors at your institution.
- View results data that is automatically calculated and presented across all teams, within a team or drill down to the individual student level.
- Release a performance report for all students in a course with one click so they can learn from the peer feedback they receive.
- Feedback Loop’s Canvas Peer Review Plugin is a great way to improve your team-based learning outcomes and foster a classroom culture of professionalism and industry-like teamwork.
To learn more about Feedback Loop’s Canvas Peer Review Plugin, click here to schedule a demo and consultation.
