The goal of this assignment is to promote team reflection, to plan for the next phase, and to provide feedback to the teammates. Upload your responses via the Google form: https://goo.gl/forms/mKlXdsuCOwktixLP2.
One of the goals of this assignment is to practice expressing any frustrations or disputes in constructive and professional ways. It likely won't be long before most of you are managing people in industry and being able to provide honest and kind constructive criticism is exceptionally important.
Something that is particularly important is thinking about how your biases might shape your evaluation of your teammates. Although we often talk about biases we might have regarding women, biases are important to acknowledge across race, class, sexuality, gender-identity, native language, academic history, personality, 5C-college they attend, your relationship with the person, and broadly how you might see yourself as the same or different than the person. (This list is certainly not comprehensive!) Biases can exert a positive or negative influence on your perception of the person. One way to examine these biases is to think about how these biases might change your expectations of the person. Having these biases doesn't make you a "bad" person. What is important is learning to recognize and change the ways your biases may affect your behavior.
This assignment should satisfy the following criteria:
- Professional - The document is written such that it would be appropriate to share it with your teammates.
- Unbiased - Review this NCWIT resource about writing unbiased letters of recommendation.
- Proactive - The document shows evidence that you have been proactive in supporting your teammates.
- Completion - The document is complete, clearly written, and submitted on time.
During the semester, the instructor will use these evaluations, along with your group assignments and weekly reports (with developer hours), to issue "advisory" grades. In future phases, students are expected to address concerns of their teammates, clients, and staff brought up in these evaluations -- these concerns will be relayed to the development teams by the instructor in team and one-on-one meetings the week following each phase. The last phase is not evaluated on its own but is folded into the final evaluation. Remember that this "holistic" grade is worth a significant portion of your course grade.