Looking from a vacation from the ordinary peer review?
Far too often, peer editing and review days can become a total black cloud over even the most engaging classroom. Like a dream vacation gone wrong, there’s nothing worse than a lesson plan that loses focus and totally collapses under the weight of all sorts of time-wasting frustration and stress. Not to mention all of that unnecessary baggage that so many students feel at the prospect of having their writing torn apart by their peers!
This week, EMC² Learning invites Engagement Engineers to take a break from this far-too-ordinary source of student and teacher frustration and join us on a trip to the Instructional Islands — a step-by-step guided peer review activity completely adaptable for any class from middle school through grade 12. In this all new activity, students will have the opportunity to soak up the good vibes of a free-flowing peer review as they island hop their way throughout the classroom in order to punch up any writing assignment under the sun.Â
Get your passports ready!
Using this resource, your students will hop between a series of “Instructional Islands” with the goal of collecting stamps on their passports as they encounter all sorts of different targeted improvement areas. Along the way, they’ll have the opportunity to review DOZENS of examples of works from their peers while scoring points and adding themed items to their inventory as they go. And teachers can float freely between groups, providing targeted support for struggling learners wherever necessary!
This resource walks you through everything you’ll need to let a laid back, student-centered peer review come to life in your classroom. The step-by-step prompts, questions, and lesson plans included in the download help teachers navigate a high-energy, tropical themed peer review game where students will spend up to a full 60 minutes or more examining the written drafts of their peers. And as is the case with every other resource available inside the EMC² Learning platform, this entire activity is fully editable so that it can quickly be modified to suit the unique needs of any writing prompt or content area from middle school all the way up through a college writing seminar.
(True story! We’ve proudly heard success stories from teachers who have made EMC² Learning resources work in both of these environments!)
The activities featured in this blog post are just a handful of the 600+ resources available in the EMC² Learning library. This entire library is available to Engagement Engineers and members of the Creative Corps, and is included with your annual site membership. We hope you’ll consider joining us as an Engagement Engineer to unlock a full year of site access. For complete details including our exclusive limited time offer for annual site membership, click here.
