Peer review workshops get a bad rap, and that's because it would be so, so great if they worked...and then they often don't. There is a reliable formula for making it work, though, and it boils down to framing the goals of a "peer review workshop" ahead of time and some facilitation as things unfold. Here's how it goes:
- Identify what a "peer" is: Students engaging in peer review should be working on similar enough assignments and be at similar enough stages that they're able to engage in an apples-to-apples give and take of feedback. Grouping students accordingly is key.
- Define what the process of "review" will look like: Students should know what they're doing during stages of the peer review session, e.g.,
- First, go over a list of questions—ideally a handout with room for taking notes—that students will answer as feedback for one another's writing. The questions should be drawn from the assignment/rubric, and students should be aware of that.
- Next, give students a sense of how long they should spend reading each draft and answering the provided questions.
- Finally, students should know whether and how they should debrief feedback in their groups. Do they give their partner(s) the handout with their notes? Do they ask follow-up questions about the feedback they've gotten?
- Make sure students know what to do with peer feedback: Students should have a sense of how to use the workshop to help them re-engage with their own writing, e.g.,
- How should they weigh the accuracy and usefulness of feedback they're getting? Some feedback will identify black-and-white areas of improvement (you only used one source, but the prompt asks us for two; your thesis and argument aren't aligned with each other), while other feedback might be subjective (I don't find the counterargument in paragraph 4 convincing).
- How can they apply what they're seeing in other students' writing to their own? Emulating the good habits of other writers and avoiding their bad habits is one of the most effective ways to improve as a writer. Emulating habits and patterns isn't, of course, the same as plagiarizing. With that in mind, be sure to give students guidance about the collaboration policy for your course and when/how they should cite the ideas or advice they get from peers.
- How will they translate the workshop into an actionable approach to revision? Leave time at the end of the workshop for students to sketch out a revision plan, or make a list of the 3–5 "next steps" for revision, or try their hand at revising a part of their draft.
As long as all three of these things are in place—students are grouped intentionally, they're following a script that is aligned with the assignment prompt + rubric, and they're concretely applying the workshop to their own writing—peer review workshops are on the path to being successful. And they're worth it: not only do they put students at the center of their own assessment and improvement, they help instructors incorporate a draft/revision cycle into assignments where the timing or instructor-student ratio might otherwise not make that cycle feasible.
