Peer Feedback Made Easy: Boost Writing Quality and Lighten Your Load

Conferring with students during writing is a critical piece of strong writing instruction. As Susan Brookhart says in her book How to Give Effective Feedback to Your Students, “Feedback can be very powerful if done well.  Good feedback gives students information they need so they can understand where they are in their learning and what to do next…”   But there’s no question that figuring out how to get to every child can be challenging. The question always arises:  in my limited time, how can I possibly confer with all my students? This can be made a little easier when we leverage peer feedback.  By harnessing peer feedback, we can increase the feedback frequency–and it’s easy to do!

With intentional training, your students can actually become helpful “teachers “ to each other. 

Imagine this: you look around the classroom and see all students writing. Now imagine that you are conferring with a student or a partnership,  while a couple of student partnerships are also meeting together, heads bent over their writing.  If you listened in to their conversation, you’d hear them asking each other questions and providing helpful advice to move the writing forward.  

By teaching students how to coach each other, the feedback opportunity has just been multiplied. 

“Besides relieving me of some of the pressure, creating a classroom culture where students give each other feedback has helped me increase engagement and build community.”

Edutopia, 10/8/21

This is not a dream. It can absolutely happen! Here’s how to make peer feedback work (I promise it’s easy!):

Tip one:

It’s very important to model this sort of conference from the get-go. 

Students need to experience how it goes. They need to understand the types of questions that  might be asked during a conference as well as the types of responses they might provide. They need to learn to have a productive conversation–one that is helpful and far beyond surface-level. 

As you confer with kids, you are modeling this exact thing while also giving kids the practice they need in responding to this kind of feedback.  

Another tip for making peer feedback easy?  

Leverage the students’ checklist or rubric you’re already using. 

Kids need to understand what components their writing should include, and they need to understand what success within those components means.This will ensure that the peer feedback isn’t stuck at surface level.  If you constantly reference the success criteria according to the checklist or rubric with your kids, then they will learn that same language in order to know how to help others. After all, if that tool is something that students can use for themselves in their own writing, it’s only logical that they can then use that same tool to help a peer. 

“Teaching students how to give peer feedback can also help promote self-reflection and self-awareness.  When students are providing feedback to their peers, they are also reflecting on their own work and understanding the areas where they need to improve.” 

April Smith, Simplify Your Writing Instruction

A third tip for getting peer feedback conferences started?

Use student writing against exemplar writing over the course of your instruction.

Where the checklist or rubric gives kids the academic language needed to understand success, exemplar writing shows kids a picture of what that language looks like.  Then, in looking at their own or another students’ writing against the exemplar and against that rubric, kids know exactly what kind of advice to offer that would strengthen a particular piece of writing. 

This of course is not done in a day.  It’s through using this sort of practice over time, that gives kids the practice they need to use that academic language in the context of actual writing. This also serves to solidify understanding of success criteria for both students. 

Knowing that when we can teach other people something, it’s a sign that we know that something very well, the child who is giving the feedback is also solidifying that same feedback for themselves. This also creates a greater sense of ownership and motivation for their work. Knowing that somebody else’s eyes besides the teacher’s are going to be on their writing  is extremely motivating for students. 

Here’s a fourth tip for getting peer feedback going strong:

Use your own writing (when it’s not perfect) along with the rubric or checklist you’re using to practice giving high quality feedback with the whole class. 

This shared experience not only provides practice using strong feedback language, it also gives you the opportunity to model receiving constructive feedback.  You can also use student writing in the same way.  The student writing can be actual student writing from your class (with their permission, of course), from a fellow teacher’s class, a child’s work from a previous year, an example from a curriculum resource, or even an AI-generated one. The more authentic, the better.  

My biggest tip? 

Implement peer feedback slowly. 

You definitely don’t want to say, “OK, everybody pair up and give each other feedback” without these steps in place. 

Even then, start small. Maybe you have a student whose writing is strong or who receives feedback well and is able to implement it with only a small amount of further guidance from you. The kids that have the strongest conversations with you are the ones that will have the strongest conversations with others from the start. They are perfect feedback role models. 

Take a look at where these students are strong. Are they great at using a variety of sentences to interest the reader? Have they really learned how to organize their writing so that the sections all cohesively fit together? Do they never miss an ending punctuation mark? (Well, almost never?)  Do you notice another child who needs this particular work? Ask the first child if they will assist the second child in that aspect. The key here, just like with your own conferring with students, is to keep it to one thing and one thing only.  

Teaching kids to stay focused on just one thing is key to keeping it all manageable. Keeping it to a minimum of just one important thing, not only preserves the writing time for writing, but prevents anything from going off the rails. This should be, just like your conferences with students, quick, simple, and to the point. Get in, give/get the advice and then get out and get writing.

One final tip:

Designate a spot in the room just for this work. 

There should be a limit to how many kids are able to confer with each other at one time.  The most I’d recommend is two partnerships. It can also be helpful to develop a system for the times when students need help with something.  It’s easiest if predetermined student partnerships are set up for this, but alternatively, you might develop a sign up system, or maybe designate specific days for peer feedback.  You might decide there’s a need  to limit how many times a student can ask for peer feedback in a week or unit.  

…and one must-have tool

I also highly recommend the use of a timer.  Five minutes, max.  This helps keep students focused on that one thing and heads off any off-task talk before it ever even occurs. At the same time, it sends the loud and clear message that time spent giving and receiving peer feedback is business, not play. It’s also not an excuse to get out of the work of writing.  It is the work of writing.

Leveraging your students to act as “co-teachers “not only helps you to provide students with more feedback more often, it empowers your students tremendously. It’s a level of respect that nothing else can compare to. By encouraging peer feedback, we  show  kids that we believe in what they can do,  believe in their ability, and you have faith that they are valuable contributors to the learning. 

So do yourself a favor and train your students to confer with each other.  But go slowly.  Take your time in doing this so that you can have confidence that your students will be off and  running strongly with peer feedback later in the year.  With a careful and intentional rollout, leveraging peer feedback can be a big  timesaver and community builder!  

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Are you ready to give peer feedback a try in your classroom?  I’d love to hear about it!  Send me an DM on Instagram, let me know in the Facebook group, or simply leave a comment below this post!

Who is Coach from the Couch??  I’m Michelle, a 25-year veteran educator, currently a K-5 literacy coach.  I continue to learn alongside teachers in classrooms each and every day, and it’s my mission to support as many teachers as I can.  Because no one can do this work alone. I’m available to you, too, through virtual coaching calls!