Faculty Resources

Teaching Resources

A Successful Critique

Good critiquing provides students with constructive feedback (LINK), but it is also a teaching tool. A good critiquing session should show you not only who can produce the work you are expecting, but also who can recognize the criteria you have put forth and express their thoughts in a professional way.

Student participation is essential to good critiques.

You need to teach students how to participate and create an environment that fosters this kind of participation by:

• Building trust in your classroom by involving all of the students and letting them know that their input is valued.
• Letting the student talk about his intention in the piece that you are critiquing.
• Giving the students tools to participate — vocabulary, and specific questions to answer.

Tips for making critiques work

Timing timing timing. Plan how much time to spend on each piece and stick to it. Students whose work doesn’t get critiqued feel like they lost out.
Use an evaluation sheet which list the criteria from the original assignment to keep critiques on target. Distribute these if you are dong a student centered critique.
Grade students on their participation in critique. They need to know that participation counts.
Always point out work that completes the assignment most successfully.