Sentence Starters for Peer Review on Lab Reports

 I am currently in the middle of a  New Pre-AP Biology Teacher Cohort since my school is adopting the Pre-AP Biology curriculum for our Biology students next year. Today we were talking about the Pre-AP Course Framework and model lessons and how they support our teaching. Then we moved onto challenges that we may have that are not specifically addressed in the teacher supports. As we talked about the peer review that was happening for the student developed model of the carbon and water cycle in the lesson, we discussed of the struggle that students have in giving valuable feedback. One of our moderators suggested that we provide students with sentence starters to help guide them to more valuable feedback. 

This idea immediately resonated with me. After every mini poster presentation we do in class, students provide feedback to the other lab groups before I grade them. Sometimes students give great feedback, but often it is not helpful. For example, a favorite feedback of my students is suggesting that students write more neatly. Since I don't take points off for penmanship, this is not helpful feedback for improving their poster presentations. Usually toward the beginning of the class, after our first experience with peer feedback on these labs, I collect all of the feedback post-it notes and we work as a whole group to classify the feedback as helpful or not helpful. This leads to slightly improved feedback going forward, but still not as valuable as I'd like. 

This year I'm going to provide them with sentence starters to use.  I am debating about how I will provide them. One option is to project the sentence starters on the TV for them to choose as they are doing their peer review.  I could also print them, cut them out, and let students grab them to fill out instead of just giving them blank post-it notes. I've made Google Drawing that I can project, as well as pages of each sentence frame so I could print and students could fill them out. 

Here is the link for the sentence starters to project.

Here's the link for the sentence starters that could be printed and written on.