Thoughts on Collaboration

In the education field, collaboration is a tool that should be used in every classroom. There are many ways as a teacher that one can incorporate collaboration. Some examples are peer evaluation, group formation and role assignment. My one concern was peer evaluation, is it more beneficial or harmful for children. The plus side of peer evaluations are that students learn from each others mistakes. However, in some cases children may feel discouraged knowing that their peers just graded a assignment of theirs that was filled with errors. After discussing it on the classroom documents, some ideas were that all students make problems and it is good for children to see that it is okay to make mistakes. Another suggestion that I really liked was using anonymous peer evaluations. Doing so, children can learn from others mistakes without knowing which student it was. Although I do agree that children should not "take everything to heart", at a young age, the smallest things are a big deal. With that being said, if there is a way to avoid it, I would take that route.