A High Yield Strategy: Peer Feedback

High Yield Strategies: Peer Feeback

This week grade 7 students have been working on very structured writing activities. They have had to write short essays supporting particular points of view based on evidence they have gathered from texts, their background knowledge and from what we have learned in class.  Once the essays were written students were asked to provide feedback to their peers based on Success Criteria that we had developed as a class. Success Criteria include the structural elements or text features as well as thinking. Peer feedback is one of the many High Yield Strategies that Ontario teachers have been trained to use to improve student learning. Teachers in our school have been experimenting and developing systems for this process. 

Below are examples of peer feedback. Students used postit notes to mark points in the essays where they found evidence of the Success Criteria. They are expected to look not just for text features (thesis, evidence etc), but also for thinking - did the writer make inferences, go beyond the most obvious interpretation, include original ideas ...  They were also expected to make suggestions for improvement. Peer feedback improves the writing of  the provider as well as the recipient. Students then meet and go over the feedback with their peers.  

Once this process was finished, I went over their work to make further suggestions for improvement.  Students who were clearly struggling with the process (perhaps 4 or 5 in the class) went to the Resource Teacher for additional instruction for 1 period. I assess the quality of the feedback as well as the essays.

Here a student has pointed out that the facts are incorrect in the essay.