Hi, this is Jenny with craftED, talking to you today just about how hard peer feedback is, I think every one of us educators would say it’s definitely a source of frustration, a pain point for students, teachers, parents.

So, I just want to offer up three different strategies for you to possibly try in their classroom

One of my favorites was to use a visible thinking routine with a model of student work, something that was similar but not necessarily the same as what students were going to be creating, and I would share it with them and ask them to reflect you know what did they see, would it make them think and why did it make them wonder and I would chart their responses, and what we would do with that chart is it actually became kind of our expectation for what a high quality product looked like according to their observations.

So, we generated this nice list for what we thought made for say; a really compelling public service announcement, right? And we would use that list and come back to it for students to reflect on their own work but also to give each other feedback using whatever things we had listed in that chart.

So, it gave them something very concrete to look for characteristics and the student work they were giving feedback on

Another is I know this sounds really simple but you’d be amazed how helpful it is to use sentence frames, so to actually give students the language that they need to give their peers feedback, it’s really hard especially for students that want to be nice and they don’t know how to say that their peer needs to do something a little bit better or sometimes you know a student might sit down and look at their peers work and say this is really good, I don’t know how to tell them to make it better

And, so we need to give them those tools so I used to actually project up sentence frames up on up on my projector on the wall, but you can provide those sentence frames any way you’d like, it’s just, it gives them the language to give each other feedback

And the third idea is one that I got from a colleague of mine and that’s just to use pink and blue sticky notes to represent warm and cool feedback and they can actually put the sticky notes directly on the student work, so it becomes very concrete what they’re talking about, for helps us to avoid that really vague feedback when the student kind of sits back down and look at what their peers said they’re not sure what they’re talking about, they can actually push it on the place in the work that they’re referring to, and again using those sentence frames can be really helpful to write out on the sticky notes what they’re warm and they’re cool feedback is.

So, those were my top three that I used to use all the time in the classroom and I actually continue to use them with adults too when we’re looking at our own work and project reflection and refinement

So, I hope at least one of them is useful for you to give it a go in your classroom.

Other resources:

https://craftedcurriculum.com/product/peer-feedback-for-oral-presentations/

 

https://www.bie.org/blog/4_ways_to_provide_feedback_in_pbl