Blog Post #3 How Can You Provide Meaningful Feedback to Your Peers?

As a teacher, it is our job to provide useful feedback to our students and help them to grow academically. As students, we can also provide feedback to our peers through peer review. Providing help to our peers is very easy and can be very helpful if it is done the right way. When you are editing a peer's work, you are complimenting their work while also making suggestions on what needs to be changed or fixed in their work. You are helping to improve, revise, and edit their work.

There are three important steps to remember when you are editing someone's paper. First of all, begin with a compliment, you do not want to be too harsh on them or hurt their feelings. If the tables were turned and someone was editing your work, you wouldn't want them to be harsh on you. Remember to stay positive with your compliments. The second step is to make suggestions, give the writer some advice on how to improve their writing. Some things that you can make suggestions about would be: word choice, details, organization, sentences, and topics. After you have made suggestions, it is time to make corrections. Too often writers will make grammatical, spelling, or punctuation errors and it is very easy to read over it and miss the errors. Comb through their paper and be sure to find every error and correct it. Finally, it is important to be specific when advising the writer on how to improve their writing.

Helping our peers out will ultimately help us out in the long run, and will make us become better teachers and learners.