Inclusive Peer Review

Peer review can be a means for building a more inclusive class community. Below are some suggestions for helping to ensure that peer review in your course is equitable and inclusive for all students.

• Work together as a class to create peer review norms that highlight what respectful feedback means for your class.
• Model kind and effective feedback for your students in your assessment of their work.
• Consider splitting a projects’ final grade between a “student grade” and a “teacher grade” and/or use responding to peer feedback as a criteria on your final grading rubric/criteria. This shows that you value the input and opinions of the students in your course. In addition, consider having multiple students assess one another’s work or share assignments with names redacted to avoid favoritism among peers.
• Promote assessment from a reader’s perspective rather than an absolute judgment. Instead of “this was bad,” encourage students to frame their feedback with something like, “when you wrote (THIS), I felt (THAT) because (REASON).”

Instructors can work towards making peer review an anti-racist practice to help combat white-dominated discourse and practices pervasive in academic spaces. Here are some ideas of how to start doing this work:

• Challenge the idea that there is a singular “right” way to write.
• Design peer review protocols and norms that attend to the way writing can be simultaneously empowering and challenging in different ways for different writers.
• Focus on specific rhetorical situations and writing concepts over white-dominant language standards. This includes highlighting things like ideas, evidence, and thoughtfulness more than one dialect of grammar correctness.
• Discuss how audience expectations and different contexts shape the choices we make as writers and how producing “Standard Academic English” is, ultimately, a choice.
• Talk about where conceptions of “good writing” come from and who they benefit, and then encourage students to view their peer review process through this lens.
• Decenter whiteness (and other -isms) by having your students create their own criteria for effective writing for the project.
• Support students in learning how to respectfully and constructively point out confusion and ask questions rather than correct their peers’ work for them.