In collaborative learning classroom
Peer review gives bad vibes

Teachers trying to incorporate collaborative learning and team building activities in their English classes often latch on to peer review as a way to accomplish those goals.

Before you decide to use peer review as a classroom team building exercise, take a quick look at the term from a student's perspective.

You may find the negative connotations make peer review an unsuitable term to use in describing the kinds of team building exercises and collaborative learning activities you want to build into your program. If so, there is other language and other collaboration techniques you can use instead.

Reviews in K-12 settings

The term review does not have positive connotations for students. In school, review is something teachers say students should do in preparation for a test.

When teachers say, "We're going to review," that means the teachers are going to review and students are going to be bored.

Do you want to initiate a collaborative learning activity with all those negative vibes?

Reviews in writing workshops

One situation in which peer reviews are common is in writing workshops such as those found in college writing programs. You may have students whose older siblings or parents were in such a program.

In these programs, participants typically must apply for admission and the entrance requirements assure that the group members are peers — equals — with regard to their writing experience and skills. On the surface, these would appear to be true collaborative learning situations where participants help each other develop as writers.

However, in writing workshops, the purpose of the peer review may be to develop students' critical abilities rather than to help the student whose work is being read. In that case, the review primarily benefits the reviewer, not the author. The two are not co-laborers.

Moreover, reviewers typically know whose work they are reading. They usually comment on it orally in group settings. Authors sometimes feel baited and bullied rather than supported.

Reviews in scholarly publications

Publications known as scholarly or professional journals often use "peers" to sift articles submitted for publication.

The journal editor typically sends articles (with the author's name masked) to a group of respected people in the particular field to get their feedback as to whether the article is worthy of publication. Journals that are peer reviewed are more highly respected than those that rely on the judgment of an editor alone.

The feedback in publication peer reviews is entirely one way: from reviewer to editor to author. The author and reviewer do not discuss the article. There is no collaboration between them, let alone any collaborative learning.

Often the article's writer(s) and the reviewers are peers only in the sense that they are all employed in the same discipline. They are rarely peers in the sense of having similar levels of expertise or success in their field.

The reviewers' concern is whether the article's content makes a contribution to its field. They look at such things as how well experiments were designed and whether the author did a thorough job of reviewing the work of other scholars.

Because a bad review can mean the article doesn't get published, and that, in turn, can me the author doesn't get a job, the term peer review has negative connotations for many academics that they carry into school and college settings.

Just because your students haven't faced that experience doesn't mean they don't know someone who has.

Alternative terminology is better

Save yourself grief by avoiding language that will turn students off. You'll find it much easier to get students to help each other learn to write better if you don't use the term peer review.

Learn alternative language you can use to describe collaborative learning activities in which students give and receive writing feedback.