Most of my assignments include a peer review component where students send their initial draft to two peers who review it and give feedback on how the assignment can be improved. I provide guidance on what effective feedback looks like, with an emphasis on helping peers submit their best work; it’s about building each other up rather than breaking them down.
As part of helping students plan their time I also give deadlines for when the assignment should be sent to their peers, as well as when it needs to come back with the feedback. I usually give them about a week to work through the draft assignment, and then another week to address the peer feedback before the final submission.
But this year I’ve noticed a big difference between students’ readiness to share their work by the due date; some of them were done with their initial drafts a week ago, while others are still asking for more time. And I have no problem extending deadlines, either for the whole class or for individual students. But today I realised that my process for managing this is all wrong because I’m the bottleneck for these decisions. If 10 students email me to ask if they can have another couple of days then I’m writing 10 emails in response where I’m basically saying, “Sure, that’s fine.” But then I also have the students who are waiting for the assignment emailing me saying that they still haven’t received it and asking what they should do.
I think that the solution is to remove myself from the process.
From now on I’ll only provide the final submission date (with one or two days on either side, for some flexibility), along with guidance for students to negotiate among themselves to set the due dates for the peer review component. I’ll still give some suggestions, for example, a week is a reasonable period of time to give appropriate feedback, as well as some considerations, for example, don’t send someone your draft the day before the due date.
I think that this is more closely aligned with what we expect in practice. And we can start by giving students the authority to make real decisions about when and how they work.