Student blogs are excellent forums for soliciting and giving feedback on student work because viewers can easily comment on an entry. Peer-assessment, such as this, is one way in which students learn to assess their own work, an necessary skill for independent learning. Helping students learn this important skill is critical in a 21st century classroom.

Unfortunately, the vision of a blog in which students participate in lively exchanges on substantive matters related to their work is rarely achieved. Instead, Often, if students comment at all, they respond generically to what is clearly a finished piece of work.

This is hardly surprising since giving constructive feedback is a complex process, a process that doesn’t come naturally even to many adults. The following guidelines can help you prepare your students to take full advantage of the interactivity of their blogs to create quality work.

1. Create a classroom environment of trust and collaboration
A classroom environment in which students feel free to take risks, experiment, and learn from their experiences encourages students to ask for feedback that will improve their work. Minimizing competition among students as much as possible and emphasizing self-assessment and improvement also promotes an environment in which students strive to create high-quality work.

2. Provide assessments to guide feedback.
Often students do not know what to look for when assessing their peers’ work. Even reminders to “Be specific” don’t help much when they don’t know, specifically, what a student product should look like. When students work with detailed rubrics, however, they can identify the areas in which a particular piece of work meets or doesn’t meet the criteria of the highest level of quality. By putting the language of the rubric into their own words, students can then give good and useful feedback.

3. Instruct students in giving effective feedback.
Giving good feedback to peers is an important collaboration skill. Like any process skill, students need frequent, careful instruction in how to perform the skill. Effective instruction can include:

1. Teacher modeling of the skill.
2. Teacher and students discuss of how the skill can be modified and used in different situations with different content.
3. Students practice with sample student products and discuss how they used the skill.
4. Students use the new skill to give feedback on real student work.

4. Make giving good feedback a valued part of learning activities.
Sometimes teachers ask students to give feedback as almost an afterthought, rarely asking them to think about the quality of their feedback. When you allow sufficient time for good feedback and ask students to self-assess the feedback they have given to their peers, you show that peer assessment is an integral part of the learning process. Reflecting on the feedback they have given can help students grow as collaborators.

Teaching students to give thoughtful feedback to their peers is a challenge. We would welcome any strategies that you have found to be successful. When students’ blogs are places where they give and receive good feedback, everyone’s learning is enhanced.