Peer Feedback

When I was a growing up, I loved being my mother's helper and grading papers from her 1st grade class. She gave me a red pen and I was ready to roll with a check, check, check, and topped with a "Good Job! :)". When I became a teacher, I will admit that I was still guilty of sometimes giving "empty" feedback to students. It took (and still takes) intentional practice for me, now a veteran educator, to provide descriptive feedback. That little trip down memory lane is to show that giving feedback must be intentional as well as specific and targeted. When we pair up student peer reviewers to discuss their writing, we cannot expect that students will naturally have beautiful and articulate academic peer review conversations without some instruction, modeling, and scaffolding.

Here are a couple of strategies to get peer review started off right with your classes. 

TAG Strategy

During the August 19 PD Session, we showed pictures of students in the high school writing camp group working together to provide feedback on their writing. Prior to them trying it out, the teachers in the group modeled the TAG Strategy with our own writing. It is easy, yet effective.

Peer Feedback Sentence Starters

If your students need more help with academic discourse around peer review, click here for a bundle with sentence starters and other response cards (Source: Panicked Teacher). These can be used across content areas and for a variety of writing and project-based learning tasks.

Be sure to connect with me or one of the UNCG writing workshop participants to learn more about students sharing their writing with peers. 

~Chandra