Strategies for Peer Review
By Katelyn Fish One of the most powerful tools for writing has been stifled in the classroom simply because we don’t know how to correctly implement it. This tool is peer review. The idea itself is simple—just have students read and comment on each other’s writing—but hidden within this simplicity is a vehicle for learning that can get student papers from apathetic essays to genuine pieces of writing. As a pre-service teacher, I feel a strong need to make sure that peer-review time is not wasted in my classroom. Yet like all tools, peer review is only as effective as its implementation. Let’s look at a few different ways to use peer review in the secondary school classroom. 5 STRATEGIES FOR PEER REVIEW 1. Sentence Stems We typically don’t expect students to instinctively know how to engage in academic discourse or debate—which is why we explicitly teach them how to interact in this way. When students are first introduced to Socratic Seminars, they experience the most
