Peer Review Sessions for Writing / Projects: Learn by Teaching

Peer teaching provides a powerful opportunity for your students to share knowledge, ideas and experience with one another while actively taking part in their own learning process. Incorporating peer review techniques in your course can be an effective way to initiate students into a mutual learning partnership.

Why Peer Review? It fosters collaboration, student participation and giving and receiving feedback. It builds skills like reading and writing, critical thinking, self-analysis, reflection and communication. Peer review hones critical reading, writing and revising through important practice.

However robust feedback does not happen automatically. You need to guide your students by demonstrating what you expect. There are models and guidelines out there to  help you. A simple on is called RISE and it will help you develop concrete expectations for your students when you require them to assess one another. 

• Reflect: peer feedback vehicle  "I relate/concur/disagree with X because… I like what you did with X because…"
• Inquire: peer feedback vehicle "Have you considered looking at X from Y perspective?"
• Suggest: peer feedback vehicle "You might want to consider tweaking X for Y effect…"
• Elevate: peer feedback vehicle "Perhaps you can expand on this in X fashion to further address Y…"

Feedback Model Resources 

• Step Through the RISE Model Links to an external site.
• Setting the Stage for Meaningful Peer-to-Peer Feedback Links to an external site.
• Rise Model for Meaningful Feedback Links to an external site.

Canvas offers a Peer Review tool where students are assigned, thru Canvas, to review a classmate's work. You can use the tool if you are comfortable or you can create a Canvas assignment where students review a classmate thru an uploaded word document form. The tool is not as important as the activity itself--use what you are comfortable with. For a set of resources on using Canvas Peer review visit the Canvas Help Resources

George Saban's IT Software Architecture & User Interface Design was built around the central concept of a cooperative journey with feedback from peer's and the instructor.  The reason--to be successful in software development you need to embrace the idea of critical revisions based on feedback. This course was built to be a safe place for giving, accepting, externalizing and internalizing feedback with a collective unifying goal--generating innovation. 

Your critique will be graded as part of your class community engagement expectation. To meet these expectations: Provide critiques for two classmates. Each critique must have two positive and two constructive comments. Each comment must be supported by evidence from weekly material, peer-reviewed research, or your own relevant professional experience. Critiques are original or add value to someone else’s critique. Utilize each others' skills and talents. Encourage classmates to reach their potential and bounce ideas off each other.

Issues with Contemporary & Future Practice, an Occupational Therapy course, used Zoom for a series of Think Tank sessions throughout the 10 week term. Early in the course doctoral students learned about innovators, creative disruption and pitching. This culminated in the opportunity to take their projects to a new level as Innovators pitching their own project idea for feedback. When they were not pitching they had the responsibility of acting as Thinkers, providing concrete feedback.  Zoom was critical to these Think Tank sessions with its synchronous immediate feedback.  By recording the sessions and posting them in Canvas, reflection and additional feedback became possible--on the pitch, the feedback and the process itself! 

Breakout Rooms in Zoom provide the opportunity to partner students during a live session to work together, perhaps while sharing a document, to provide feedback to each other. You have the ability to pop into the rooms to listen and guide their process as you might do in the classroom. See Zoom: Everything you need to know to think about what you might do with live feedback sessions in your course.