Why is peer feedback and assessment so commonly relegated to the margins of teaching practice?
Done well, it can move learning forward, make pupils more responsive to feedback, and it can potentially reduce teacher workload. Though it is no doubt tricky to get right in the classroom, the benefits of peer assessment can be worth the effort.
Yet I seldom see a focus on it in school feedback policies, or hear it being explored and debated in conferences or online. Instead, debate about feedback nearly exclusively focuses on the “see-saw” of methods between written and oral feedback. Peer feedback is an afterthought.
So, are we missing a vital opportunity to improve learning and reduce teacher workload?
Peer feedback, active learning
Insights from Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam’s Inside the Black Box: raising standards through classroom assessment (2010) have resounded through teachers’ feedback practices for years. But have we really paid close enough attention to the messages of this research?
In their description of the “five strategies of formative assessment”, Black and Wiliam make it clear that peers can be a key part of the process. They recommend “activating learners as an instructional resource for one another”.
Despite this, peer assessment is less likely to make it on to lesson plans than other, teacher-led approaches. But why? Are teachers sceptical of the benefits? Do they worry that peer feedback is less controlled and less effective than teacher-led feedback?
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Peer feedback is likely beneficial because it demands more engagement with the feedback process. In addition to responding to teacher feedback, pupils must also evaluate the work of one another. When you need to assess a friend, you gain the benefit of exposure to other examples, ideas and approaches.
Of course, there are also potential drawbacks to getting a little help from your friend. Pupils are not subject experts, so their feedback is not likely to be as accurate as the teacher’s. As a result, some pupils may not see their peer as a “knowledge authority” and may therefore not respond meaningfully to their feedback.
Is peer feedback effective?
So, should you be using peer feedback or not?
For the approach to be successful, teachers need to weigh up the benefits and drawbacks of peer feedback strategies, and bear these in mind when planning. For example, if pupils give peer feedback on a piece of extended writing, it can add a beneficial layer of insight that is likely to remove at least some errors and highlight some improvements. If teachers then follow this up with their own feedback - which can perhaps be more scaled back than usual - pupils may experience the best of both worlds.
Using it as a supplement to, rather than a substitute for, teacher feedback is likely a helpful approach. In addition, teacher modelling and ample discussion of effective and ineffective feedback are likely to prove necessary. Clear prompts and protocols will be needed to keep feedback friendly and on track.
Yes, this means that peer feedback might not be the total workload saviour we might have hoped - but that doesn’t mean it can’t still be useful.
So, how can we get peer feedback right in practice? The following three strategies can help.
1. Prompt-focused peer feedback
Rather than pupils writing comments based on a mark scheme or similar (or worse, writing empty praise), focus their feedback by offering them questions as prompts. For example, “does this make a clear point?”, or “could you convince me with more evidence?” By focusing on such questions, pupils are forced to give feedback that their partner will need to act on and that they cannot dismiss as easily.
2. Peer feedback, then teacher feedback, then personal response
This sequence can be the best way to really make the most of peer feedback. By asking pupils to deliver feedback to a partner, before building on their comments yourself, this allows you some quality control over the comments. Asking the pupil being assessed to then add their own response encourages them to more fully engage with the process.
3. Creating a composite answer
One way to move peer feedback forward is to encourage pairs of pupils who have fed back to one another to devise a composite answer. This can get pupils to think hard about their best combined ideas and, again, properly engage with their peer feedback.
When deployed effectively, these approaches might save teachers a little time on marking. But, more importantly, they have the potential to improve learning, with a little help from pupils’ friends.
Alex Quigley is the national content and engagement manager at the Education Endowment Foundation. He is a former teacher and author of Closing the Writing Gap, published by Routledge
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