Peer review is a great way to demonstrate the benefits of making one’s thinking visible, and to make students more accountable for their work. As side benefits, the process can result in cross-pollination of ideas in your classroom in ways that nothing else does. We’ve often left up work for days and note that students show increasing interest in others’ work over longer periods of time, and are more able to compare and contrast and so improve their own work when they have the ability to go back to the examples over and over. When they know that their peers will be looking at their work, they tend to take it a bit more seriously. In younger grades, students seem to benefit more from knowing that others will see their work (and so taking more care in producing it), than in what they gain from looking at others’ work. In higher grades the feedback itself becomes more precise and so more meaningful, though there is huge variation in these throughout classrooms. In this slide show are a number of strategies for ways of using Peer Review, generally written for a specific task though some are broader, with accompanying teacher notes.

As you try them in your own classroom you’ll figure out new things to add or tweak for your circumstances. There are basically four major areas to consider:

1. Purpose: Why are they doing this peer review (it might be so that they see other representations, or so that they do take their work seriously, or so that they practice how to write feedback for someone else).  If you can’t articulate a reason for doing it, don’t. 

2. Logistics: How will students view work. Will they move around the room looking at lined up or table work? Will they exchange with another group? Will they do a jigsaw? Not only do the logistics depend on the task, but also on the need for variety as well as the time it will take. A gallery walk is much more quick and efficient, but may be less deep. It’s good for comparing just one thing, for example. Also in this category of logistics is how students are recording their feedback. Sticky tags are convenient and popular, but expensive. Scrap pieces of paper work just fine, and I’ve seen in-person comments force kids to choose their words more carefully. Also, writing directly on the board with a coded pen can be effective as well.

3. Feedback prompt: Very important for eliciting meaningful feedback. This could be along the lines of comparing images, looking for similarities and differences, looking for specific responses to the task. You should always be clear about language you do not expect to see: anything that is non-specific, critical or harassing, or even joking. Note that younger grades need practice at this, but as with any skill, the more they engage in it the better they get and the more seriously they take it. Using terms like Peer Review lends an authenticity that they learn to respect.

4. Follow-up: Just like all of us want to DO something with feedback we get, we need to resist the urge to move on after this task and instead allow students a chance to process it. This can be done in many ways: a dialogue about what they learned from the feedback, preceding or followed by a writing prompt for their notebooks; if appropriate, a change to revise their own work based on what they saw and feedback they received; brief reports on what groups changed based on the Review.