In a thought-provoking piece from Harvard Business Review titled “Are Peer Reviews the Future of Performance Evaluations?” (January 2021), authors Alessandro Di Fiore and Marcio Souza dive into the growing shift from traditional top-down performance reviews to peer-based feedback in the workplace. While their focus is on professional settings, the insights they uncover about the value of peer feedback have profound implications for teamwork learning in the classroom. Let’s explore why peer feedback matters and how it can enhance collaborative learning among students.
Why Peer Feedback Stands Out for Enhancing Teamwork Learning
The article highlights a key trend: companies are increasingly turning to peers, rather than just managers, to evaluate performance. Why? Because peers are boots on the ground, viewing work done in a way leadership and management may miss. They are in the trenches, witnessing the small wins, the quiet struggles, and the true day-to-day dynamics of their teamwork. Research cited in the piece backs this up: peer reviews can provide a more holistic, accurate picture of someone’s contributions, especially in collaborative environments. They also foster accountability and trust, as team members know their efforts (or lack thereof) won’t go unnoticed.
In the classroom, the need for peer to peer insights in teamwork learning is at least as important as it is in a career setting. Every week, we talk to instructors and faculty who are concerned of an unfair distribution of team-based workload in their courses, commonly referred to as free riders. Some even avoid teamwork learning altogether to avoid the issue, resulting in students missing out on groupwork experience. Students working on group projects, whether it’s a group project, a presentation, or a design challenge, spend hours collaborating, debating, and problem-solving together. An instructor grades the final product, but peers see the process: who showed up prepared, who bridged communication gaps, who failed to contribute. Peer feedback taps into this insider perspective, making it a tremendous resource for improving teamwork.
The Benefits for Students
Di Fiore and Souza point out several advantages of peer feedback that resonate in an academic setting:
- Real-Time Growth: Unlike end-of-semester grades, peer feedback can happen mid-project (or earlier!), giving students a chance to adjust their efforts before the groupwork ends. One of the reasons we designed Feedback Loop to be so user friendly and efficient to use is to help instructors issue peer feedback throughout their project.
- Shared Ownership: When students evaluate each other, they feel more invested in the team’s success. The article notes that peer reviews encourage a sense of mutual accountability, which can combat the classic “free rider” problem in group work. Feedback Loop makes it easy to share anonymized insights from each student’s peer feedback so they can directly be accountable to their teammates.
- Skill-Building: Giving and receiving feedback isn’t just about assessment, it’s a skill. The authors emphasize that peer reviews help professionals hone interpersonal abilities like empathy and constructive criticism. For students, this practice doubles as career prep, mirroring workplace trends.
- Diverse Perspectives: Peers bring varied viewpoints, catching strengths and weaknesses a single evaluator might miss. In a classroom, this means a shy student’s quiet leadership or a bold student’s overbearing style gets noticed and can then be addressed.
Applying Peer Feedback to College Teamwork
Here are some practical ideas inspired by the article:
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Structured Check-Ins: Mid-project, have team members rate each other on specific criteria—like reliability, communication, or creativity—using a simple rubric. The article suggests clear guidelines reduce bias, so keep it focused: “Did they meet deadlines?” rather than “Are they professional?”
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360-Degree Reviews: Borrowed from the workplace model in the HBR piece, this involves everyone (including oneself) assessing the team. Students reflect on their own contributions while hearing from peers, creating a fuller picture of the group dynamic.
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Anonymous Input: The authors note that anonymity can boost honesty in peer reviews. Feedback Loop makes all responses anonymous even when results are released back to students. Further, selected questions can be set to not be included in those released results, providing students with a direct outlet to the instructor about their views of their teammates’ performance.
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Tie Peer Feedback to Goals: Link feedback to the team’s shared objectives. If the project demands creativity, ask: “How did this person contribute to our innovative ideas?” This aligns with the article’s emphasis on connecting evaluations to organizational (or in this case, classroom project) priorities.
A Word of Caution
The HBR article isn’t all rosy: it warns of pitfalls like cliques skewing reviews or unclear guidelines leading to vague critiques. In the context of teamwork learning, this might look like friends overpraising each other or shy students getting overlooked. Professors can counter this by setting explicit standards and mixing up group assignments to break up biases over time. At Feedback Loop, we created an innovative question type where students rate one another with a zero-sum points pool, requiring them to take from one student to give more points to another, with controls ensuring students do not give all teammates the same score. This style of question may not be a fit for every course, but for maximum real-world effect, it directly mimics workplace performance reviews given out when mapped to compensation.
The Bigger Picture
Peer feedback isn’t just about grading, it’s about personal growth. For college students, it is a chance to mirror real-world teamwork, where collaboration and accountability go hand in hand. As Di Fiore and Souza argue, peer reviews are gaining traction because they reflect how work actually happens: through relationships, not just directives. In the classroom, embracing this approach can turn group projects from a chore into a lab for leadership, communication, and trust.
Transform your students into coaches for one anotehr with peer feedback. With the right structure, the feedback students give one another could be the key to unlocking not just a better grade, but a better team. For more on how peer feedback and releasing results back to students can enhance grades over all, we recommend reading this study.
