I don’t want to burden you with one more thing; teaching right now is EXHAUSTING. I have found that having templates and frameworks for peer feedback has given myself and my co-teacher a little breathing room, while giving students an essential skill: online communication.
One thing we often complain about is how ill-equipped students (and even adults) are about building on the ideas of others and respectfully disagreeing. To teach this skill, we need intentionality, scaffolding, and practice.
Begin with Norms and/or Sentence Starters.
Whether the feedback is written or oral, I give students the language to agree, build upon the ideas of others and respectfully disagree. This seems to work effectively to give my students something to use as a starting point. I introduce it EVERY time I require peer feedback; the hope is that it becomes automatic.
A few templates
In this Peer Feedback template using Google Slides, students have a spot to add their digital creations and a spot for peer feedback. If you give all students the ability to edit, the bonus is you have everything in one presentation for easy marking and sharing. This can obviously be done using Office 360 as well.
This Peer Feedback template is more about having a place to share student thoughts or ideas (based on a provocation, reading, etc…).
And finally, I LOVE Jamboard for its ease of use. Now that you can add an image as a background, you can literally add any graphic organizer as a background and have kids use text, the drawing tool, or a stickie note to contribute. I created this Jamboard peer feedback template to use when students are in Breakout Rooms. If you are new to Jambaord, check out my YouTube playlist here (and Subscribe if you would like to get notified when I share new video tutorials.
Check out this peer feedback form using Google Forms and conditional Formatting by Mari Venturino
School Tools vs Real Tools and the Power of Connections
As much as I think building online communication skills with peers within our classes is really important, whenever we can, we should provide students with opportunities to provide feedback to others outside of the class. This might look like having students respond to a tweet or blog or comment on a YouTube video or add a review on Goodreads. We need to give students authentic audiences and impress upon them that communication skills are important whether they are using “school tools” or platforms they use outside of school. Just recently, our students exchanged feedback with educator and author Sean Robinson’s class in British Colombia; Sean and I are both passionate about connecting students for authentic learning. Most of my students had never responded to a blogpost before; let alone blogposts written by other students. Robinson’s students have replied to our students and will give our students oral feedback on their Climate Change prototypes. Although not an extensive connection, my students found it really interesting to see that other students from across our country were engaged in learning similar content and knowing that others will be seeing their projects and providing feedback and suggestions, made them take the assignment more seriously.
I hope these resources may help you in some small way.
