Teaching Useful Peer Reviews

If you're a teacher of composition, chances are you probably incorporate peer review into your classroom. However, it can often be difficult to explain to students why peer review is important, and how they can provide useful and thoughtful peer reviews. When creating an exercise, here are a couple of things you can think about:

• "So what?" Students have very busy academic lives, and they generally want to know what's in an activity for them. Peer reviewing can seem like busywork, so explain what's helpful not only to their classmates but to them about doing peer reviews. Many students say that reviewing someone else's work in a methodical, critical way helps them identify weaknesses in their own writing that they might not have seen before. It also allows them to experience composition as a reader and not just a writer.
• "What am I doing?" A good peer review will do more than present judgment on the writing: it will explain where the reader had trouble or found problems and suggest ways of improvement. Encourage students to go beyond "I liked this" or "This doesn't work." Being able to give suggestions for improvement in a tactful, approachable manner is a very useful real-world skill!
• "How do I do this?" When creating your peer review exercises, more is better when it comes to instruction. Handing students a "blank slate" and telling them to "review" a peer's paper can be overwhelming. An exercise that breaks the peer review into short, clear steps will make everything go much more smoothly. Choosing a focus for the exercise will also help make the task more manageable within a set timeframe.
• "How do I say this?" If your department uses a rubric, like UGA's First-year Composition program does, try to incorporate language from the rubric into the exercise. Explaining to students what to look for when they're thinking about "coherence" or "audience awareness" will give them language to explain to their peers what they mean and will enable them to target their comments more specifically (and therefore productively).

Sample exercises will be available on our blog soon!