Tips for Effective Peer Review

To end our institute, but not the goals of the institute, we will conduct a peer review of our PD sessions. You can access the files from your home computer using the Novell Net Storage application as we discussed in our Day 4 session. When assessing your peer, please keep in mind the following suggestions.

Tips for Effective Peer Review:
Adapted from Grant Wiggins & Jay McTighe UBD Peer Review

For our purposes the designer is the creator of the professional development session. The reviewer is the individual giving feedback.

Use the rubric we created, listing characteristics of effective Professional Development Sessions, to guide your feedback.

The reviewers should be friendly, honest consultants (critical friends) to the designer. The designer’s intent is the basis of the review. The aim is to improve the designer’s idea, not replace it with the reviewers’ teaching priorities, style, or favorite activities.

The reviewers’ job is twofold: first, to give useful feedback: second, to give useful guidance. How might the professional development session be improved considering our standards (the rubric criteria)?

A peer review session is successful when the designer feels that his/her design was understood by peers and improved (or validated) by the subsequent critique and discussion.


Misconception Alert
A common misconception about peer review is related to the assumption that we should judge the work of others and that others will judge our design. But the goal of review is to provide helpful feedback and guidance, not a judgment.
The distinction between feedback and guidance is almost universally misunderstood. Despite common parlance, feedback merely describes what happened, not how you feel about it or what should be changed.
The most common mistake in peer review, therefore, as a result of this misconception, is to assume that the peer review process is meant to offer praise and criticism. That is far less important than accurately describing the design’s strengths and weaknesses based on design standards, so the designer(s) will understand why advice is offered.