By now, you know the 6SA structure and the grading criteria. Before you assess your colleagues’ 6SAs in class, it is important to practice the application of the grading criteria. For this purpose, this chapter presents three 6SA examples for you to score. All examples come from the same assignment that was presented in the case of this training manual. Testing yourself with this interactive exercise will ensure that you understand the grading criteria and that you are equipped to assess your peers’ work.

Note: If your assessment aligns with the assessment prepared by the inventors of this exercise, you are ready to go. If you have major disagreements, take another look at the grading criteria. If there are only one or two points of disagreement, that’s fine. The grading criteria are designed to be clear and objective, but they also leave room for interpretation. That’s why every 6SA is evaluated by several reviewers.

Receiving Feedback 

Receiving Feedback can be hard. It is your responsibility to learn from your peers’ assessments of your work. We summarize on how you can handle feedback in the following video:

Final remarks

Avoiding frustration

There are some potential sources of frustration when working with the 6SA. Below are three common sources of frustration and recommendations on how to avoid them.

• There is no right and no wrong. When you can argue for anything (using 6SA or other techniques), and even your teacher is not able to tell you the correct answer, it may seem that it does not really matter what you think. That is absolutely not the case, because no matter how many opinions, there is only one action that is taken. Other opinions should encourage you to evaluate your own opinion, but if you remain convinced that you are right, stay passionate about promoting your recommended action. One possibility to resolve a multitude of opinions is a democratic vote.
• I was misunderstood. It can happen that you really thought about a case and came up with good ideas, but the reviewers did not appreciate them. Somehow they did not see the merit of your thinking, or did not bother to really understand it. The responsibility for avoiding this experience is shared between you and your reviewers (see next point for reviewers). For you, negative reviews can be a hint that you did not succeed in bringing your clever points across. That’s okay, the exercise is there to work on that. Keep trying to express your good ideas in such a way that others see how good they are.
• I got useless or mean feedback. It can happen that you spend a lot of time writing a 6SA, but a reviewer does not take the time to give you a proper review. Or, perhaps a reviewer spots actual problems, but makes comments that are extremely harsh. If this happens, take a break and then try to deal with the feedback very objectively by extracting just what is useful for you – forget about the rest. If you have the opportunity to rate the feedback, make use of that option. If you feel this is putting at a disadvantage in terms of grades, you may also consider notifying your teacher. However, above all, write your feedback in a positive way that avoids these frustrations.

Limitations and Next Steps

The 6SA exercise is designed to help you structure your thinking, practice giving constructive feedback, and to develop a more critical perspective on your own thinking and writing. Hopefully, you progress towards these goals as you work with the 6SA. However, the exercise also has limitations. For example, structuring an argument in six sentences is only one of many ways to present a convincing argument. You could also do it in five or seven sentences. Also, six sentences with twenty word does not allow to present very elaborate arguments, for example by outlining several reasons that support a decision.

We recommend to see the 6SA as an exercise to practice the basics. Mastering the exercise equips you with basic skills that help you perform better in thinking and writing. For example, you learn how to organize your thoughts in a structure. If it becomes easy for you to express your thoughts in six sentences, you can go on and express them in any other structure. Also, you learn to give feedback and to anticipate feedback. That can help you to communicate more effectively in many practical situations, especially in the workplace. Finally, you practice to take a critical distance towards your own thinking and writing. Taking that distance puts you in a position to evaluate and improve the way you form opinions and take decisions. This is a skill that not many people have.

What you take out of the exercise also depends on your current skill level. If you do not have a lot of writing experience, learning to work with the 6SA structure will need a lot of attention at the beginning. As you become comfortable with the structure, your attention will shift towards the peer review component. If you already have a lot of writing experience, you will probably be able to master the structure quickly, and find most value in giving constructive feedback and receiving peer reviews.

If you feel the 6SA exercise does not go far enough, there are many ways in which you can build on it. For example, you can extend a six sentence argument into a six paragraph essay, if you want to develop an argument with more detail and background. You can also use six sentence arguments to prepare for discussions and debates. Or, you can dig deeper into the philosophy of what makes reasons and arguments convincing. The following references below are a good place to further explore this topic.

• Ennis, R.H., 1996. Critical Thinking, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
• Fisher, A., 2011. Critical Thinking, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• www.criticalthinking.org

We hope this document, and the exercise, is useful for you. If you would like to provide feedback to the inventors of this exercise, please consider participating in this survey: Feedback Form