Critical Friends Protol - Video Reflection - Ray Tedder

Protocols like “critical friends” can be a very effective tool to help teachers become more reflective of their teaching practices.

One of the problems that all people have is a blindness to those things that don't fit in our own personal paradigm of our world.  I realize that some of my teacher friends have preferences that they think are essential to good teaching, but if we are failing to see repeated gaps, holes, or problems in our teaching, this kind of feedback will have more than one teacher seeing the same issues.  When similar come to us from different perspectives it may help us to finally see those gaps, holes, or problems.

One of the things that this process in this class was that it other teachers could see things that I had not even thought about that helped me improve the project.

The Critical Friends Protocol will not be very effective if people in the group do not feel safe.  Feeling safe requires that the receiver of "I wonders..." do not feel that the sender of the "I wonders..." is being negative and critical but caring and helpful.  The former results in negative feelings and harms relationships while the latter results in feelings of being cared about and respected.  Creating the more positive, caring and helpful atmosphere may require a great deal of effort on the part of all concerned.

In the same way that we used this Critical Friends Protocol in our class to help refine and improve our presentations, the protocol could be used by students in the same manner to help their peers refine and improve their process or presentations.

I will be using a Critical Friends Protocol in my unit as a way to give feedback or critique to students as they near the date when they will be  required to present their work.  I will also be using the Gallery Walk Protocol to help groups of students refine, improve and or revise their planned experimental research procedures. There are other protocols in my unit plan at least one of which I do not have a name for as I have not seen it in any of the reading thus far (perhaps I will have to name it :-) ).