Adventures in Teaching: Taking Advantage of Peer Review

Image by Nick D. Kim
Fortunately, this is not how our peer review process went in class!

Due to the Thanksgiving holiday this week, I cancelled our Monday morning class. However, this would mean 3 weeks of not meeting in class given two Monday holidays this year, so I made the class an online one instead. I decided to have students take the outlines for their final papers, write up one paragraph (typically the introduction), and post on a forum. They would then have to review three of their peers’ paragraphs in detail (minimum 150 words).

I am incredibly impressed with how this went. As a writing-intensive course, I gave a lot of writing feedback throughout the semester. I could tell this was sticking with students because many of them used language similar to what I use in my reviews when reviewing their peers’ paragraphs! Everyone was kind and courteous but also very constructive in their feedback.

From my perspective, this worked so well that I am definitely going to incorporate more peer feedback in my courses from now on. I see a variety of benefits for doing so:

1. Students get an opportunity to see examples of other work. What does high quality work look like? What does low quality work look like?
2. Students get an opportunity to flex their skills in providing constructive feedback. If any of them are ever going to be in any sort of managerial position, this is a necessary skill that we often do not get much support in learning.
3. Students get more feedback than if it were just me alone grading. Each student received feedback from three students. Although there was some slight overlap in feedback, I saw new and unique feedback given to each student.
4. My reading load is reduced. As a writing and presentation intensive course, I felt it important that I give a lot of detailed feedback on writing, especially in the beginning. This is exhausting and extremely time consuming. It didn’t matter too much when the initial assignments were a resume or an oral presentation. However, a 2-3 page paper from 25 students? A 3-5 page paper? That’s a lot of work! Instead of only having time to give each paper 20 minutes, I could shift to peer review (with supervision, of course) after students have received enough teacher feedback at the beginning of the course.