Leveraging the Power of Peer to

Peer Feedback in Entrepreneurship

Teaching Teaching Entrepreneurship Strand

Wednesday 27th April 2016: Day 2,

Gareth Stone MSc FHEA

Entrepreneurship Pathway Leader

Diana Reader PhD SFHEA

Business & Management Subject Leader

The Course

• BA (Hons) Business & Management – BM6005 Enterprise: Creating Your

Business • 20 credits at Level 6

• 130 students: 1 tutor

• 3hr per week (13 weeks).

• Focus on New Venture Planning. – Individual Concept (Summative)

– Business Plan (Formative from 2016)

– Group Pitch (Summative)

Literature Says

• Assessment activities in HE tend to be designed and conducted by academics with students rarely central responsibility for the evaluative process

• Continuous assessment enables students to become active, responsible and reflective practitioners, improves the quality of learning

• Feedforward is more useful when used to enhance students’ self-regulation and stimulate the learning process.

• Improvement Potential to improve self-regulation skills and produce sustainable and long term learning (Universal agreement)

Take away: We all need help in the art of providing good feedback.

Focus

Problem: Our students tend to work well in small ‘friendship’ groups… But I want to encourage them to share ideas and insights across groups to encourage a more open style of learning?

Barriers…. • Competition • Scared of peer reactions • Time it takes • Need to protect idea • Grade focus

Aim - Improve Student Attributes • Idea not graded • Positive feedback only • Ask students to complete a simple

version of the task • Students take rationalized action based

on the feedback – explain actions. • Reflect carefully on peer feedback and

literature – But - Reference peer comments ONLY in

written work

• Encourage a more ‘open’ view of group work.

• Contract with each other.

Leverage

Things I found helped me to keep things on track… • Clarity on what is being marked - Idea or

Process? • Early bird actions - Facilitate a simple on-line

exercise in class • Random selection for on-line groups – It’s OK. • Self-organizing groupwork. Caveat: Formation

of groups must be linked to skills and attributes. • Reduce workload by using a simple model

(BMC) • Negative feedback – is banned

– I liked the way you… – I think you could improve by…

• Close the loop… students to think through and say what they will do with the feedback

• Require Peer Citation - comments from feedback to be included in written submission

• Micro Blogging about group progress

Enablers

• Engagement up

• Quality of submissions improved

• Happy sheet improvements

• Likes include: – Holistic understanding

– Lots of group activities

– On-line social

– Communications

Assessment

Assessment Design

60% Concept Documentation

• Originality? Unlikely. Encourage difference and innovation.

• Facilitate: Stake a claim to the idea

• References related market research and discussions on the course.

• Reflexive focus

40% Group Pitch

• Coalesce around student selected ideas (Self-organised but facilitated – light touch)

• Use expert panel

• Collect feedback from experts to use in improvement feedback – never raw!

Positives

• Good to get feedback from peers

• Scary at first but found myself going on line to see if anyone else had posted.

• I got some really good feedback on my idea

• Reflecting on the feedback from my group made me rethink my idea

Negatives

• Difficult to comment on other peoples work

• Very time consuming

• Not everyone gives good quality feedback – just look at the comments of others and write something along the same lines

• Some good feedback was given after the deadline and I couldn’t use it

Feedback, Questions &

Comments