As a Capstone coach you will have both the opportunity and responsibility to provide feedback to teams as a whole and to students as individuals. Your clear and candid feedback provides students an opportunity to learn from their work and to improve their performance. Some of the formal opportunities for feedback are listed below.
At the conclusion of each stage of development, your team will have a design review to see if the team is ready to proceed to the next stage. During these reviews the quality and transferability of the product design will be evaluated by one of the instructors and two of the coaches from your instructional pod.
Please make sure your team schedules design reviews when you can attend, and make sure to attend the reviews. Important suggestions are often given during the reviews. If you're not there to hear them, you can't help the team apply them.
In addition to evaluating your own team, you will be assigned as a review coach to two teams in your pod. Review coaches evaluate stage approval packages and give feedback to the team in writing. They also attend design reviews to give verbal feedback. As a review coach, make every effort to attend the stage reviews for your assigned teams. Your feedback will be invaluable.
Your evaluation of the team and the team members will provide important feedback to the students. Please make your evaluation both honest and kind.
Every student on the team will be expected to complete a peer evaluation twice per semester. Once the evaluation is complete, you will be given the results. You should analyze the results and share them with the individual members of the team to help them improve.
It is best if you take the time to discuss the results personally with each team member, so you can best provide any support needed to help students as they struggle to improve.
Students are expected to keep a record of their individual accomplishments that move the project forward. The team should decide which of the provided forms they will use to track the project. Team members should probably all use the same form, although individual team members may elect to use a form requiring more careful time tracking than the team selects, if they desire to do so. See Individual Contribution Summary Worksheet for more details.
Twice per semester (in the middle and at the end) you should evaluate each team member's contributions and give the member a grade. The mid-semester and end-of-semester grades constitutes 10% of the student's project grade. The dates for these reviews are found in the Coach Requirements tables for fall and winter.
It is expected that most students will receive 100 on their individual contribution assessment. All students who are full participants in the team should receive 100. If students are not contributing full, drop their score accordingly. Students who are providing little if any contribution to the team should have a score below 70. Please talk with your pod instructor if you have any students who have scores below 70.
Some coaches have found that having brief weekly reviews of the individual accomplishments can help the team make better progress.
Normally, all students on the team are fully engaged in the process. When all members are fully engaged, all deserve to receive the team grade, even if some members have higher contributions than others.
In rare instances, students will withdraw partially or completely from team participation. If this happens on your team, please work immediately to get the withdrawing student back into full participation. If you are unable to do so, let the instructors know as soon as possible. We'd like to work together to solve the problem. If our best efforts don't result in improving the situation, we'll need to talk at grading time to ensure a fair grade is given that represents the student's actual participation.
Students evaluate their coach twice per semester based on six categories:
The Capstone Office will provide you with the amalgamated responses of your students for you to review.