Effective Peer Feedback (or The Third Kind of Porridge)

At the table in the kitchen, there were three bowls of porridge. Goldilocks was hungry. She tasted the porridge from the first bowl.

“This porridge is too hot!” she exclaimed.
So, she tasted the porridge from the second bowl.
“This porridge is too cold,” she said
So, she tasted the last bowl of porridge.
“Ahhh, this porridge is just right,” she said happily and she ate it all up.

It’s an interesting story how Goldilocks became common language in regards to writing thesis statements. My English 2 Honors students are currently working on a research paper synthesizing multiple authors’ works and analyzing how the authors’ styles are used to craft similar arguments in their writing.

If you think that sounds like a really difficult task, you’re right. I would never be able to do that when I was in high school. But my learners are not backing away from the challenge.

Yesterday, I was reading Raychel’s thesis statement which had a very insightful take on how each author used style effectively, but an unclear picture on what arguments were being created. She was trying to be so specific on the authors’ arguments that she ended up being unclear. I gave her some feedback on how to clarify what she thought Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes were demonstrating about inequality in America and sent her on her way.

A second learner, Arya, brought a draft of a thesis to me for feedback. Her thesis did a nice job addressing the arguments of the authors but was very vague in regards to the authors’ style. She wanted to discuss many types of each author’s style and therefore left her so broad that she really wasn’t saying anything. She had the same issue Raychel did but in the opposite part of her thesis.

And this is when I did something different than what I might have done in the past when my focus was different. Previously, I would have given both of them separate feedback and let them work in isolation.

Instead, I sent Raychel to Arya, and gave them an analogy of Goldilocks and the Three Bears from above. They each needed to work to get to the just right level of specificity. They needed to get to third kind of porridge. Each one was succeeding where the other was struggling. I told them to give each other feedback on their thesis statements and bring them back to me when they BOTH felt great about BOTH thesis statements. Here’s some of the comments I heard while they worked:
“I like this idea, but maybe you need to reword it. It’s not as clear as it could be.”
“What do you mean when you say this? I read it to say…”
“How can you write this more concisely?”
“This isn’t just right yet, but it’s too warm instead of too hot.”
“This might be uncomfortable porridge right now, but it’s definitely better than it was.”

I was so proud to hear my words coming out of their mouths. The feedback that they were giving to each other was exactly what I would be saying to them.

In our class, we have moved our focus away from grading and points and towards feedback and growth. We have spent months working on being reflective with our work. Learners have written and spoken about specific actions steps to take in order to improve their thinking. They did peer reviews, modeling, and revision based on the feedback they received on their work. They also read sample work to practice giving feedback to others. The class got feedback from me on the feedback they gave to each other. They compared their feedback to mine in an effort to calibrate our expectations as a classroom on what great work should look like.

As they transitioned back into their own work, they realized how much they craved feedback from other learners in the room, not only feedback from me. As they are working on their own writing, I hear every student asking for another set of eyes to read through a sentence or paragraph. They want specific suggestions on how to strengthen their work.

All of this was done without ever attaching a grade to any of it. But they did it nonetheless. They have moved away from being grade hungry and instead become feedback hungry.

Effective teaching isn’t about grading; effective teaching is about making the classroom as feedback rich as possible. If teachers want their classrooms to become learning rich environments, invest in teaching learners to give, receive, and utilize descriptive feedback.