Every English teacher has run a peer review day that fell flat. Students swap papers, read for two minutes, write a compliment, and hand them back. The bell rings and nobody's essay is any better.

The problem isn't that students can't give feedback. It is that they haven't been taught what feedback looks like. Without a clear task, they default to vague praise or to fixing commas, which is the easiest thing to notice.

A Mango Street unit is a good place to practice. The essays are of a manageable length, the texts are shared, and every student knows the material well enough to judge whether a claim about Esperanza holds up.

Below is a protocol that keeps peer review focused, brief, and useful.

Give Reviewers One Job at a Time

Instead of asking for general feedback, assign each round a single focus. In the first, reviewers only look at the thesis. In the second, they look at whether each quotation is followed by an explanation. Narrow tasks produce sharper comments, and students feel less overwhelmed.

• Round one: underline the thesis and write whether it answers the prompt
• Round two: mark every quotation and check that an explanation follows
• Round three: circle any place where the writer summarizes instead of analyzes
• Round four: note the strongest sentence and say why it works
• Round five: write one question the essay leaves unanswered

Model the Process First

Before students review each other, review a sample essay together on the projector. Show what a useful comment looks like and what a useless one looks like. Ten minutes of modeling changes the quality of everything that follows.

Provide sentence starters for comments, such as I was confused when, or your strongest evidence is. They give students a way in without dictating the content.

Grade the Feedback, Lightly

If peer comments carry no weight, effort drops. A small score for the quality of the feedback a student gives, based on specificity and use of the review focus, signals that the task matters. Keep it modest so students don't feel penalized for a classmate's poor writing.

It also gives you a window into what students understand about writing. A student who can spot missing explanation in someone else's paper is close to fixing it in their own.

Add a Feedback Layer Before or After

Some teachers run an AI feedback round first, so peer reviewers see an essay that has already been checked for basic issues. Others run it after, and ask students to compare peer comments with tool-generated feedback and decide which suggestions to act on. Both approaches build critical judgment about feedback itself.

Either way, the aim is the same. Students should leave peer review with two or three specific revisions in mind, not a general feeling that the essay is fine.