Peer Review

If I were to be in control of peer review, I wouldn't change a whole lot but I would add just a few more steps. Every one of my english classes has had a different way of peer reviewing and every technique that I have used over the past couple of years has helped me turn in better papers. So I figured that my way of doing peer review would be combining all of my favorite techniques.

This first technique is one that I have just recently learned last semester. I would have the class pair up and exchange papers. After exchanging papers each student would then read, out loud and in front of their partner, his/her partners paper. Having the students peers read their papers in front of them helps them realize how others are going to be reading their paper. They can then change their paper in any way to make it how they want it to be read. This also helps in noticing unorganized sentences or sentences that make no sense. When each pair has completed reading each others papers they would then exchange papers with another classmate.

After the students have completed the first and second exchange they would take their own papers and read them aloud to themselves. In doing this they will hopefully realize why their peers were reading certain parts of their paper differently then what they had expected.

When the students have all read their papers aloud to themselves then they would all pair up again, but with different partners then they had the two previous times. Again, they would exchange papers and instead of reading them aloud to each other, they would read the paper and look for mistakes such as grammer, sentence structure, and spelling. Each student is allowed to make marks on the papers along with making comments about their partners writing.

Overall each of these three steps have helped me personaly in taking my papers to the next level. I really like the way that we are currently doing peer review in class therefore, in my last step of peer review i would also use the same worksheet to fill out while reading our peers papers.