never thought of this before

A little idea prompted by #mathchat on Twitter (thanks #mathchatters); I'm not sure it's what any of them meant but it gave me a thought ....

I often start a new topic by asking students to do spider diagram (concept map) of what they already know about it We share these together and add to them and then refer back to them during the topic and often at the 'end', perhaps before an assessment activity.

I wonder if it would be better to start with the diagram but then ask pairs of students to 'assess' each others? We could design criteria such as: number of ideas/facts, 'difficulty' of same, things that could be taken further. Then we could design individual targets such as 'learn more about ...' 'be able to solve problems involving ....'

The key would be to then design activities to prompt such learning and to ensure we definitely revisited at the end.

I am revising with my Year 11 class right now. I wonder if I could try this out?

Has anyone else done this sort of thing?