Peer-review can seem like a daunting task for some teachers. You may ask yourself is it productive? How do I get student buy-in? Where do I start? These are all good questions. If you have not used peer-review in your classroom before now is the time to try it. If you have used it unsuccessfully, maybe these tricks will help you provide a better experience in the future.
Why You Need Peer Review
Planning a peer-review into your classroom can help your students become better signers, collaborators, and communicators. If done right, peer-review can be a rewarding experience and beneficial to all the parties involved.
Issues That Can Arise
Although peer-review can be a rewarding experience, there are issues that can arise. Students may feel uncomfortable sharing their ideas or showing their work. Students may not know how to provide feedback. They might even lack the language they need to give another student feedback. Students might even feel overwhelmed because their partner’s work has too many errors or is difficult to understand. Whatever the issue, there are ways to make the experience valuable for all the students involved in the peer-review process.
Modeling and Practice
Don’t just expect students to know how to give feedback. You have to model and practice the prerequisites for students to become helpful reviewers. We want to give students the tools to be good peer-reviewers in order for them to become relevant and helpful in their classmate’s progress. Make sure you provide sentence structures for good peer feedback.
You can find sentence structures and more in this premade packet designed to save you time.
What Steps Do We Take?
Create a prompt that you are wanting students to present on. Make sure you include the “non-negotiable” items you want to see in the presentation, but remember to not list out specifics (for example, 5 questions, 10 new words, must be 2 minutes in length, etc.) as this can limit student’s work or intimate students making them feel like they can’t do the task.
Give students a specific time frame to record their work (1 day, 15 minutes, 1 week). Once that is completed, it is time for the first round of constructive feedback. I like to give 3 rounds of feedback if I have time. The first round of peer feedback focuses only on content. Students are not looking for grammatical errors they are only focused on what is being said not how it is said. Think “message.” Is the message clear? Is the message detailed? Is the message of interest to the audience? After the first round of feedback, you can have students conference with each other or in small groups. Students can then re-record the video or you can choose to change reviewers and move to round 2 of the feedback process.
Round 2 of the feedback is more of a checklist item. In this portion of the feedback, peers will look for the “non-negotiables.” You would create a checklist of items that must be in the video presentation. These are things like title, lighting, expressions, etc.
For the third round of peer feedback, students will look for mechanical (grammar) errors. This round is much tougher for reviewers. They really need to focus on the sign formation, fingerspelling, NMS, and sentence structures. Sentence structures should really focus on what was taught during the unit, however, upper-level students should be able to bring in structures they have learned in the past. I always ask for sentence structures to be varied.
The third round would benefit from using the Loom app, or one like it, because you can make actual comments or use emoji faces at the actual time the error occurs.
The Teacher’s Role
After the peer-review process, it would benefit the students to get actual feedback from the teacher. This can be done with a rubric or teacher-student conferencing. Conferencing does take time so it probably can’t be done with every presentation. However, it is beneficial for the student to get some one-on-one time with you. During the conference be ready to provide information to the student on what they are doing well and what they can improve on. The student should come to the conference ready to discuss what challenges they are facing and why they are having problems. Together the teacher and the student should come up with a plan to improve expressive language.
Now it is your turn…
Now it is your time to try peer-to-peer feedback. Remember, you may not always have time to provide all 3 rounds of peer-review and you may not always get teacher-student conferencing in, but do try to incorporate this idea often even if you can only provide time for one round. Have fun.
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