Peer review workshops on essays about The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks can meaningfully improve final essay quality before a teacher's grading pass begins, but only when the workshop is structured carefully, since unstructured peer review on emotionally and ethically weighty material tends to produce either superficial praise or feedback that misses the specific analytical skills the assignment is trying to build. Given how much of this book's content involves genuine moral complexity, students reviewing each other's work need clear guidance about what to look for, since their instinct without that guidance is often to comment on whether they agree with a classmate's position rather than on the quality of the argument and evidence supporting it. A well designed workshop structure channels peer feedback toward genuinely useful, gradeable improvements before the essay reaches the teacher.

The most effective peer review structures give students a short, specific checklist tied directly to the same rubric the teacher will use for final grading, rather than open ended instructions to "give feedback" on a classmate's essay. A checklist item like "does the essay acknowledge at least one counterargument to its main claim" or "does the essay distinguish clearly between 1950s and present-day consent standards" gives peer reviewers something concrete to check for, which produces far more useful feedback than a vague prompt to comment on whether the essay is "good." Students reviewing against a specific checklist also tend to internalize the rubric's expectations more deeply through the act of applying it to someone else's work, which has real pedagogical value beyond just improving the essay being reviewed in that particular session.

Given the sensitive nature of some of the material, particularly essays that touch on medical racism or personal family reflection, teachers should think carefully about how peer review groups are formed and what ground rules govern the workshop discussion. Some teachers avoid peer review entirely for the more personal, reflective versions of this assignment while still using it for the more purely analytical or historical versions, recognizing that not every kind of writing about this book benefits equally from a peer review structure. Setting explicit ground rules about respectful engagement with sensitive content, established before the workshop begins rather than addressed reactively if a problem arises, helps prevent peer review from becoming a source of additional stress for students already writing about difficult material.

Training Students to Give Useful Feedback

Many students have not received explicit instruction in how to give feedback that actually helps a peer revise, defaulting instead to either overly general praise or vague criticism that does not specify what to actually change. A brief training exercise before the first peer review session, where the whole class practices giving feedback on a single shared sample essay together, models what specific, actionable feedback looks like in a lower stakes setting before students are asked to apply that same skill to a classmate's actual submitted work. This modeling step, though it costs some class time upfront, tends to significantly improve the quality of peer feedback throughout the rest of the unit and often the rest of the semester, since the skill of giving useful feedback transfers well beyond this single assignment.

• Give peer reviewers a specific checklist tied directly to the teacher's final grading rubric
• Model what specific, actionable feedback looks like using a shared sample essay first
• Set explicit ground rules for respectful engagement before any sensitive content is discussed
• Reserve peer review for the more analytical, less personally reflective versions of the assignment
• Require students to identify one specific strength and one specific area to develop further

Deciding Whether Peer Review Should Affect the Grade

Teachers need to decide, and communicate clearly to students, whether the peer review process itself will be graded separately from the final essay, and if so, what specifically is being evaluated in that peer review grade. A common and reasonable approach grades students on the quality and specificity of the feedback they gave to a peer, separate from and in addition to the quality of the final essay they eventually submit, which incentivizes genuine effort in the peer review role rather than treating it as a low stakes activity students can rush through without real engagement. Grading peer feedback quality does add some additional grading work for the teacher, but it tends to be relatively quick, since evaluating whether feedback is specific and checklist-aligned is a faster task than evaluating a full analytical essay.

Some teachers choose not to grade the peer review process directly, treating it purely as a formative step that improves the final essay without adding its own separate grade, which reduces overall grading burden but also reduces the incentive for students to take the peer review role seriously. There is no single correct answer here, and the right choice depends partly on a given class's culture and how seriously students tend to approach ungraded activities, but the decision should be made deliberately and explained clearly to students rather than left ambiguous, since ambiguity about whether an activity counts tends to produce inconsistent student effort across a single class.

Using Peer Review Data to Inform Teacher Grading

The checklist responses students generate during peer review can actually give a teacher useful information before they even begin their own grading pass, since a pattern of multiple peer reviewers flagging the same weakness in a given essay, such as a missing counterargument, is a reasonably reliable signal worth checking during the teacher's own read. This does not mean a teacher should simply defer to peer assessment, since student reviewers, especially early in a unit, may miss things an experienced teacher would catch immediately, but the peer checklist data can help a teacher prioritize where to focus their attention during a fast read of a large stack of essays.

Some teachers explicitly ask students to submit their peer review checklist alongside their final revised essay, which gives the teacher visibility into what specific feedback the student received and whether they actually incorporated it into their revision. An essay that clearly addressed a specific piece of peer feedback, visible by comparing the checklist notes to the final draft, demonstrates a level of revision engagement worth acknowledging in the teacher's own feedback, even if the final essay still has room for further improvement beyond what the peer review process alone was able to catch.