You might also schedule a peer review workshop for your class hosted by the UWC. I've found those to be helpful.

Now I give different, shorter guidelines. See my website:

http://instructors.cwrl.utexas.edu/jones/?q=node/128

Just fyi: because peer review is manditory for every paper now, we'll be discussing it quite a lot in 398t. We'll talk about several ways to approach it, and having students exchange papers and fill out worksheets is certainly one way (i wouldn't have them exchange papers and *not* give them something to go by, but i don't always have them exchange papers...there are other options). And Will is right that they won't already know how to give helpful feedback--that's something they'll need to learn to do, and they are expected to learn to do it. When first year students evaluate a peer's paper, the default (non-)response tends to be "It was good; I liked it," and you'll need to disabuse them of that language right away, ahead of time.

There are several very important reasons for having students do peer reviews, which is why they are now manditory for each paper. One is to bring home to them that they are writing for more than just the teacher, yes. But i personally wouldn't go to the trouble of doing them if they didn't also help the *reviewer* become a better writer. That's my main goal when i assign peer review, and that, frankly, is why i'm okay with giving them only a T to TH turnaround. But you're right that a TH to T turnaround time would be preferable, and if time permitted, i'd choose that option. Maybe you'll figure out a way to make it happen in your schedule.

best, ddd

Before I address the worksheet question, let me mention something it took me a while to figure out: getting feedback from their peers is only a secondary purpose of doing peer review. The main purpose is to force them to write their papers for an audience larger than just the teacher. You need to tell them in advance that their peers are going to be reading their papers too, and point out that they need to write it with that in mind.

The actual peer feedback that they get is rarely helpful. Few of these students know how to write; that's why they're taking your class. By the same token, few of them know how to give useful feedback to others. Which brings us to the worksheet. The worksheet's purpose is twofold: first, to make them consider the writing and not just their own reactions to its content, and second to give them a rough guide towards how to give useful feedback.

The worksheet, therefore, should consist of questions, and they'll mostly be the kind of questions that you yourself would ask:

• What's the main point (ie thesis) of the paper?
• Is the paper intelligible? Mark anything you can't understand easily as unclear.
• Does the paper support its thesis?
• What part of the paper needs improvement the most?

That's an incomplete list, I should point out. There are lots of other questions to ask. I still haven't worked out the best set of questions, I'm afraid. Particularly on the first round, people will go down whatever list I give them and write out "good," "okay," "seems clear" and "yes," even for the most awful papers.

A note on administration: The past three times I taught this class, I had my students bring in printed copies of their papers for peer review. Inevitably, someone forgets to bring the paper. In one class, half the class forgot to bring the paper. I handled that situation poorly - I made them all go print out their papers and come back, which took half the class period and basically ruined the exercise. The next time I am in a situation like that, I'm going to kick the unprepared students out of class and mark them absent, reminding them as I do so of the potential to fail the class due to absences.

Lastly, make sure they know what's expected of them. If you expect each student to read and comment on three papers in one class period, tell them at the beginning of class that they need to get those three papers done. I once failed to tell my students this, and then they were surprised forty-five minutes later when I told them to wrap up their final comments for all three papers. Most of them were still on the first paper.