Beyond “Looks Good to Me”: Teaching Students to Critically Review Work

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Beyond “Looks Good to Me”: Teaching Students to Critically Review Work
Simple ways to scaffold peer feedback and self-correction in Brightspace

Ever asked students to review a classmate’s work, only to receive generic praise like “Great job!” or unhelpful nitpicks? 

Peer and self-review are incredibly powerful ways to help students catch mistakes in their own projects, essays, or designs before they turn them into you. However, students often don’t know what high-quality work looks like, or how to give constructive feedback. 

In this session, we’ll show you how to train students to become critical evaluators of quality without adding to your workload. 

We will demonstrate Circuit—a native, anonymous review tool built directly into Brightspace that automates the entire process. You will see how to: 

• Align Student Standards: Use a quick “calibration” step where students practice grading sample work to learn what your rubric actually means. 

• Structure Feedback: Guide students to give specific, actionable critiques instead of lazy, one-sentence comments. 

• Leverage Built-In AI Support: Show how Circuit’s AI assistant, Charlie, helps students draft better submissions and write kinder, more constructive peer reviews. 

• Automate the Logistics: Seamlessly manage anonymous submissions, peer assignments, and grade passbacks in under a minute. 

No matter your discipline—whether your students write essays, design blueprints, build code, or write business plans—join us to see how shifting the feedback loop to trained student reviewers saves you grading time and elevates final project quality. 

Location

Virtual via Zoom.

Audience

Workshops are open to all PNW faculty and instructors.

To request a disability-related accommodation, please contact the Office for Civil Rights at civilrights@pnw.edu or (219) 989-2163 five days prior to the event.

In accordance with Purdue policies, all persons have equal access to Purdue University’s educational programs, services, and activities, without regard to race, religion, color, sex, age, national origin or ancestry, genetic information, marital status, parental status, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, disability, or status as a veteran. See Purdue’s Nondiscrimination Policy Statement. If you have any questions or concerns regarding these policies, please contact the Office for Civil Rights at civilrights@pnw.edu or (219) 989-2337.