The Blind Peer Reviewers

You know who you are …. Thank You!

We had almost 70 different proposals submitted for K12 Online 2006; 36 were selected for the conference. The Keynote presenters had been solicited before K12 Online was announced on September 1. We wanted to ensure that every proposal would have a fair chance of being selected for the conference. This is how we did it …

Each convener found 3 or 4 volunteers to act as peer reviewers in their strand. When the close date for submissions arrived, midnight of September 30, each convener sent the peer review committees a summary of the proposals that had been submitted. Each convener organized this a little differently. In some cases the committees knew the other reviewers for their strand, in other cases they didn’t. The peer reviewers, based on the titles and abstracts submitted, chose the best 9 proposals in their strand. In most cases this was a very difficult thing to do. My committee was asked to pair down their choices three times and finally a fourth person was called in to make a tie breaking decision. Also, keep in mind, this entire process began on October 1 and had to be concluded by October 5 so that we could send out letters to everyone who submitted a proposal on October 6.

We structured the process this way in order to avoid both the appearance and possibility of bias by making the selections ourselves. I suppose we could be accused of bias in the selection of our committees. However, we did our level best to avoid it. In my case I chose classroom teachers who were diverse in terms of their teaching subjects, levels and geography. My colleagues also did their best to stay away from exercising any bias in the selection of presentations in their strands as well.

All along we’ve discussed how can we properly thank the people who agreed to be blind reviewers for K12 Online 2006. (Their identities are not being published in order to side step the possibility of hard feelings from anyone not selected to present this year.) Given the way we’ve structured this process, there is no adequate way to thank them. Nonetheless, inadequate though it may be, we wanted to publicly thank the people who agreed to act as blind peer reviewers … thank you; without you this whole thing would never have happened. You played an integral part in bringing it to fruition and we are very grateful for the work you have so selflessly done. We wanted to say it publicly.