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 success when the teachers scaffold the experience by modeling the process and providing the students with ideas for how to share their ideas. For example, they may receive a printed handout like the following:

You can download this handout for free here.

Such handouts give students a script as they learn how to share their ideas in appropriate ways. So why don’t we give students the same benefits when we introduce peer review? Too often, it is easy to assume that students already know how to provide feedback for each other. But what if they don’t? By providing students with sentence stems, they will be more capable of giving effective feedback to their peers, and peer review time will no longer be wasted. Your peer-review handout could look something like this:

2.     Praise-Question-Polish (PQP)

Have students use this technique for a focused peer review session. There are a few ways to implement this. One way is to separate students into small groups. Students should take turns reading their writing aloud, which allows the student to “hear the piece in another voice and to identify possible changes independently” (ReadWriteThink.org). The listeners then take a few moments to fill out the PQP form, identifying spots of effective writing (and commenting on WHY it works), writing specific questions, and then distinct suggestions for revision. These PQP forms are given to the relevant student for reference during the revision process. You can learn more about the PQP process, as well as access lesson plans that use this strategy, here.

3.     Stations

While we often associate rotating stations with elementary school, they can be effective in the secondary school setting as well. You can create a series of stations that will be most helpful to your students. Do they struggle with sentence structure? With word choice? With topic sentences? With forming thesis statements? Select a few categories that you know your students would benefit from extra practice in, and create task cards for each station (for examples of revision station task cards, click here). In class, divide students into groups and give them a specific amount of time allotted per station (or, if you are feeling particularly brave, let them work through at their own pace, like this teacher did). You can assign groups randomly or, because “sharing writing is a risk,” have students tell you one or two people they would be comfortable working with and establish groups that way (Hovan 51). Make sure that you include peer and teacher review stations into the rotation, OR, after the students have completed the main stations, let them choose one to return to and have peers read their paper, specifically focusing on potential revisions for that station.

4.     PeerGrade ©

This is a really cool online platform that allows students to submit their work to the teacher, give anonymous feedback, and engage with feedback on their own work by responding or “liking” the comments. Best of all, the teacher can track all of these interactions! This makes it easy to give participation points and see the level of revision thinking that students are implementing into their work. The essential features are free, but you can access additional tools with the Basic plan ($2 per student per year) or the Pro plan ($5 per student per year).

5.     Peer Review Rubric

One in-depth application of sentence starters is the peer review rubric. Whether you co-create this with your students or formulate one yourself, it is sure to help students learn how to be powerful peer reviewers. Rather than just giving an overall opinion of their peer’s work (i.e. “Great job!” or “Nice work!”), students have questions to answer and specific topics to consider. It’s like a “ticket” quota for a cop—students have to find a certain amount of errors or potential revisions in their friend’s writing, so they are forced to be picky. For sample rubric questions, look here. For ideas on how to turn your grading rubric into a peer-review rubric, check this out.

Try incorporating one of these techniques into your classroom. See if you get a better response than “I like it.” Let us know in the comments below!

Works Cited

Gardner, Traci. “Peer Review: Narrative.” ReadWriteThink. http://www.readwritethink.org/classroom-resources/lesson-plans/peer-review-narrative-122.html. Accessed 19 Oct. 2018.

Hovan, Gretchen. “Writing for a built-in audience: Writing groups in the middle school classroom.” Voices from the Middle, vol. 20, iss. 2, pg. 49-53. Retrieved from https://search.proquest.com/docview/1288617200?accountid=4488.

“How to Use Revisions Stations in the Writers Workshop.” 19 Oct. 2017. https://www.teachwriting.org/612th/2017/10/16/revisions-stations-in-the-writing-workshop.

Kunkel, Pamela. “Turning Matrix Rubrics into Feedback Rubrics.” PeerGrade. 9 Oct. 2017. https://www.peergrade.io/blog/hacking-peergrade-matrix-rubrics/?nabe=5781754177912832:1&utm_referrer=https://www.google.com/.

Learning in Room 213. “Revision Learning Stations.” 3 March 2016. http://reallearningroom213.blogspot.com/2016/03/revision-learning-stations.html.

Lighting the Way to Success. “Socratic Seminar Sentence Starters.” https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Socratic-Seminar-Sentence-Starters-1138789. Accessed 20 Oct. 2018.

PeerGrade. “Pricing.” https://www.peergrade.io/pricing/?nabe=5781754177912832:1. Accessed 18 Oct. 2018.

Wind, David Kofoed. “Five Ways to Make Peer Feedback Effective in Your Classroom.” 12 Feb. 2018. https://www.edsurge.com/news/2018-02-12-five-ways-to-make-peer-feedback-effective-in-your-classroom.