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Collaborative Learningand Writing

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Collaborative Learningand WritingEssays on Using

Small Groups in TeachingEnglish and Composition

Edited byKathleen M. Hunzer

McFarland & Company, Inc., PublishersJefferson, North Carolina, and London

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Collaborative learning and writing : essays on using small groups in teaching English and composition / edited by Kathleen M. Hunzer.

p. cm.Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-7864-6029-8softcover : acid free paper

. English languageRhetoricStudy and teaching (Higher)2. Academic writingStudy and teaching (Higher)

3. Peer review. I. Hunzer, Kathleen M., 1969PE1404.C6135 2012 808'.042071dc23 2012010906

BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE

2012 Kathleen M. Hunzer. All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any formor by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopyingor recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,

without permission in writing from the publisher.

Front cover image 20 Shutterstock

Manufactured in the United States of America

McFarland & Company, Inc., PublishersBox 6, Jeerson, North Carolina 28640

www.mcfarlandpub.com

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: I am very grateful to my family and friends who havealways supported me in my endeavors, my mentors who have helped mebecome the professional I am today, and all of the contributors to this

collection who worked tirelessly in order to create this practical assemblage.Thanks for all of your hard work.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments iv

Preface KATHLEEN M. HUNZER 1

Part I: Why are collaborative learningand peer review important?

Writing Courses Live and Die by the Quality of Peer Review JASON WIRTZ 5

Bringing New Perspectives to a Common Practice: A Plan for Peer Review ANTHONY EDGINGTON 17

Reinventing Peer Review Using Writing Center Techniques: TeachingStudents to Use Peer-Tutorial Methodology CATHERINE SIMPSON KALISH,JENNIFER L. J. HEINERT, and VALERIE MURRENUS PILMAIER 30

Its just too nicey-nicey around here: Teaching Dissensus in Researchand Collaborative Groups JACOB STRATMAN 43

Part II: How do I best select groups in my classes?

Increasing Student Participation and Accountability in Group Productionof Text through Speed Interviews MIALISA A. MOLINE 55

Connecting Writing Process with Personality: Creating Long-Lasting TrustCircles in Writing Classes KATHLEEN M. HUNZER 66

Forming Peer Critique Groups Through Personality PreferencesMIALISA A. MOLINE 75

Part III: How do I integrate collaborative learningtechniques into electronic environments?

Collaborative Learning and Writing in Digital EnvironmentsCINDY TEKOBBE, YAZMIN LAZCANO-PRY, and DUANE ROEN 87

Keeping Up with the Future: Using Technology to Facilitate Small-GroupCollaboration in the Writing Classroom KELLY A. SHEA 99

v

Cooperative and Collaborative Writing with Google DocsDONNA J. EVANS and BEN S. BUNTING, JR. 109

Working with Groups Online: Collaborating with Web ConferencingCHERYL HAWKINSON MELKUN 130

Part IV: Can collaborative learning andwriting work in all writing classes?

Blending Collaboration and Competition: A Model for Small GroupLearning in Business Writing Classes RANDI BROWNING 143

Revisiting Collaborative Writing and Electronic Dialogues in BusinessCommunication FLORENCE ELIZABETH BACABAC 166

Collaborative Composing: Practices and Strategies for ImplementingTeam Projects into Writing Classrooms KARA POE ALEXANDER 181

Part V: Can special populations benetfrom collaborative activities?

Working Together Towards Greatness: The Cumulative Writing Modeland English Language Learners ROBB MARK MCCOLLUM 201

Anxiety Disorders and the Collaborative Classroom KATHLEEN M. HUNZER 217

About the Contributors 225

Index 229

vi Table of Contents

Preface

I have a confession to make that may surprise you since I am here writing an introductionto a book about collaborative learning. When I was a student, I lived in fear of being assigneda collaborative project or being required to work in small groups. As soon as a teacher or pro-fessor mentioned the words group project or collaboration, my heart sank. Historically, Iwas put in a group of students who procrastinated on the project or who did not seem to careabout their GPAs as much as I did; therefore, for me, collaborative and group assignmentsmeant that I did the work while everyone got the credit.

Having had many of these experiences from K-16, consequently, I was a bit skepticalwhen I entered my English M.A. program in 1992 and came face to face with my old neme-siscollaborative learningagain. We did not meet at rst. First I learned many otherfeatures of the process classroom. I learned to view writing as a recursive process that involvesprewriting, drafting, and revising; to embrace the social-epistemic nature of the compositionclassroom; to decenter myself as a teacher so that I was more of a guide and a coach ratherthan the sole authority in the classroom; to recognize the value of one-on-one conferencing;to view the composition classroom a discourse community where students grow as learnersand thinkers; and far too many other traits and articles to name here. All of these I embracedwith open arms because they were the exact opposite of many classes I had taken and had notenjoyed.

But then I met Kenneth Bruffee and others whose research demonstrated that collaborativelearning in writing classes was one of the best ways to create this process environment, andas I read these works about the benets of collaborative learning, all I could write in themargins was wont work or yeah, right! because of my past experiences. While the researchspoke of the powerful benets of group work and the potential for growth in collaborativeenvironments, because of my personal experience with small group projects, I was convincedthat collaborative learning and small group projects were wonderful in theory but that, inpractice, they would never work.

Time and time again, the research told me that collaborative learning, when done well,is highly benecial for everyone, both students and instructor. I read and reread that collab-orative learning helps students become accustomed to their academic environment and helpsthem improve their communication skills, thus enabling students to more successfully negotiatediscourse communities both in and out of class. I also learned that collaborative learning canhelp students better understand the rhetorical situation and consider the ethical effects ofwriting on an audience. In short, collaborative learning was necessary in the process writingclass since the power is dispersed between the members of the group, thus demonstrating tostudents the benets of helping each other in times of confusion, success, and uncertaintyof seeing writing as a process of discovery and learning. These benets and others were why

1

I was supposed to promote a collaborative environment in my classes, especially in writingclasses, but I was still hesitant.

My skepticism remained until I became a TA for the late Alan W. France at West ChesterUniversity in Pennsylvania, a man who convinced me that knowledge can be and should besocially constructed and that, when done well, collaborative learning could and would succeed.He coached me through my early classroom experiences with peer reviews as well as othersmall group tasks throughout the semester. He spent time with me discussing not only thebenets of collaborative learning but also the how to do it questions I had. How do I choosegroups? What tasks do I assign? How do I grade collaborative learning? Should I? What ifpeople think Im trying to get out of work by assigning group tasks? And many others. All ofthese questions were answered with great patience and respect. Near the end of the semester,after he had observed my class twice, Alan France paid me an amazing compliment: he toldme that my use of collaborative learning and peer review was impressive because I had gottenall of my students involved, had held them all accountable, and had conquered my fear of thepractice by appearing to be an expert in the technique. Me, an expert in the practice Ihad doubted and resisted for so long? Perhaps, I thought, collaborative learning was not sobad after all.

With this newfound condence in my abilities to use collaborative learning successfully,I embarked on my career as a writing instructor. I spent two years teaching six writing classesper semester at four different schools before moving on for my Ph.D., and no matter whereI taught, I relied heavily on groups for peer review, group analyses of non-ction texts, col-laborative evaluations of speeches, and many other tasks. My frequent use of collaborativelearning continued as I completed my Ph.D. in composition and rhetoric and taught at acommunity college. After nine years of practice, I felt more prepared to speak intelligentlyand from experience about the benets of collaborative learning. My nemesis and I had claspedhands and become friends.

In 2003 when I accepted my current job, which was my rst tenure-track job, I faced adaunting task my rst semester: a three-hour night class titled Human Issues in Literature.Now, as a writing specialist, I had taught some literature, but this was not my forte, and threehours? What was I to do? And thats when my former nemesis spoke loudlyuse collaborationand small groups to explore the worksand so I did, every night in every class period. Theresults were amazing. Every night students were involved in analyses of some deep and chal-lenging pieces, and at the end of the class, these reluctant students from a variety of disciplineswho were forced to take the course as a General Education requirement told me that theyhad never learned so much about or had so much fun with literature.

As word spread of my successful use of collaborative learning in this class and manyothers, I seemed to become the go to person when people had questions about using groupsin their own classes. Many instructors knew of the benets of collaborative learning and wereseeing me integrating the practice quite successfully into my own classes, but they also hadmany questionsmany of the same questions I had worked through over the years: how doI choose groups? How do I manage my time with group work? How do I handle personalityconicts? What kinds of tasks should I assign? What if one or two students in a group doesall the work? How do I handle a student who tells me that group work is problematic becausethe student has an anxiety disorder? Can I rely on collaborative learning too much? And othersuch practical questions that involve the actual implementation of collaborative learning.

As I answered these questions for my departmental colleagues who struggle with groupwork (especially new(er) instructors), for our students training to be secondary school teachers,and for instructors outside of my home department who have heard of my success with

2 Preface

collaborative learning, I realized that our eld needed a practical sourcebook that answersthese questions, and that is what you will nd in this volume. The essays in this book are hereto help you actually do collaborative learning in your own classes. We all know that we shoulddo it; this book helps you learn how to do it.

Because I have been asked so many questions about small groups and collaborative learn-ing in the past, I have arranged this book around some common questions that I have alwaystried to address with both theory and pedagogy. In Part I, a variety of voices answer the ques-tion Why are collaborative learning and peer review important? Jason Wirtz in his essayWriting Courses Live and Die by the Quality of Peer Review provides a thorough analysisof the benets of peer review as a type of collaborative activity. Bringing New Perspectivesto a Common Practice: A Plan for Peer Review by Anthony Edgington supplements thisanalysis by providing you with strong foundational information on how to promote successfulpeer review sessions. The third essay in Part I, Reinventing Peer Review Using Writing CenterTechniques: Teaching Students to Use Peer-Tutorial Methodology, expounds on the benetsof re-visioning the performance of peer review in writing classes. Inspired by the format ofthe one-on-one peer tutorial structure of a writing center session, Catherine Simpson Kalish,Jennifer L. J. Heinert, and Valerie Murrenus Pilmaier provide helpful pedagogical suggestionsfor how to help your students embrace this new format for peer review. Finally, wrapping upPart One is Jacob Stratmans essay Its just too nicey-nicey around here: Teaching Dissensusin Research and Collaborative Groups, an essay demonstrating how we can combine consensusand dissensus productively in collaborative environments.

In Part II, three essays provide new answers to the age-old question How do I best selectgroups in my classes? Drawing on her background in professional writing classes, Mialisa A.Moline invites us to try speed interviews when forming groups, in her essay IncreasingStudent Participation and Accountability in Group Production of Text Through Speed Inter-views. In my essay, the second in this section, I relate my successes using a very simplequestion as a rst-day writing prompt to form groups. My essay Connecting Writing Processwith Personality: Creating Long-Lasting Trust Circles in Writing Classes not only providesyou with some techniques I use to select groups but also provides a few in-class practices thatcan foster trust between group members. In order to demonstrate how successful this groupselection technique is, I include at the end of the essay actual student comments that I garneredfrom a short survey. Supplementing my essay is another piece by Moline, Forming Peer Cri-tique Groups Through Personality Preferences, that demonstrates how the widely-acclaimedMyers-Briggs personality indicator can be used to promote successful collaboration.

The next section, Part III, addresses the pressing question, How do I integrate collaborative learning techniques into electronic environments? Cindy Tekobbe, Yazmin Laz-cano-Pry, and Duane Roens essay Collaborative Learning and Writing in Digital Environ-ments introduces many ways that collaboration can be integrated into digital classes.Supplementing this overview are other pieces that address specic practices in electronic envi-ronments. Keeping Up with the Future: Using Technology to Facilitate Small-Group Col-laboration in the Writing Classroom by Kelly A. Shea specically addresses small groupcollaboration in electronic environments. How to address collaborative writing needs whenusing a platform such as Google Docs is the topic of Donna J. Evans and Ben S. Bunting,Jr.s piece titled Cooperative and Collaborative Writing with Google Docs. Finally, CherylHawkinson Melkun in her essay Working with Groups Online: Collaborating with WebConferencing demonstrates not only how to use web conferencing with collaborative learningbut also how to select a proper web conferencing platform.

Many people question if collaborative learning can work beyond the rst-year composition

Preface 3

classroom. In Part IV, authors address the question Can collaborative learning and writingwork in all writing classes? Randi Browning, in her essay Blending Collaboration and Com-petition: A Model for Small Group Learning in Business Writing Classes, shares suggestionson how to merge collaboration and competition in business writing class, while Florence Eliz-abeth Bacabac, in her essay Revisiting Collaborative Writing and Electronic Dialogues inBusiness Communication, focuses on the connections between the electronic environment,business writing, and collaboration. Finally, Kara Poe Alexander demonstrates how studentscan work as teams in technical writing classes. Her essay Collaborative Composing: Practicesand Strategies for Implementing Team Projects into Writing Classrooms provides detailedadvice on how to integrate a collaborative team work project into the Technical writingclass. Although the essays in this section target very specic writing situations, I believe thatone can learn valuable lessons for all writing classes by reading them.

In Part V of the collection, the question Can special populations benet from collabo-rative activities? is addressed by two essays. Robb Mark McCollum presents his ndings inthe essay Working Together Towards Greatness: The Cumulative Writing Model and EnglishLanguage Learners, an essay that provides an excellent research model for ELL students. Myessay Anxiety Disorders and the Collaborative Classroom is the last in the collection andprovides background on anxiety disorders that frequently appear in our collaborative classes.The essay provides information about the most common anxiety disorders and then offerssuggestions as to how to address these issues in the collaborative class.

Lets face it : doing group work is not as easy as it sounds and as easy as some peopleseem to believe. Because collaborative learning can be challenging and intimidating at times,this collection provides helpful advice, answers to your questions, and reassures you that youare not the rst instructor to ask these questions. We are all in the collaborative learning boattogether, so its time for us to share our ideas and work together to make this amazingly pro-ductive pedagogy work smoothly and effectively. Enjoy!

4 Preface

Part I. Why are collaborative learningand peer review important?

Writing Courses Live and Die bythe Quality of Peer Review

JASON WIRTZ

Peer review is small group, collaborative work that is central to the writing classroombecause of its emphasis on teaching writing as a process. The process approach was rstcoined by Don Murray in his groundbreaking article Teach Writing as a Process not Productand has since become a type of rallying cry for the writing classroom. What does teach writingas a process, as opposed to product, entail? To my thinking, it means that we structure ourwriting classrooms around the ways that writers work. Writers participate in communities toaid their writing; writers read with the purpose of impacting their writing; writers use con-ceptions of audience to help shape their writing; writers recognize that writing is more aboutalternatives than correct responses; and writers realize that they must be the main investorsof their work. Lets take a look at how peer review meets each of these writing needs.

Why Should You Use Peer Reviewin Your Writing Classroom?

Peer review is the structure through which classroom community is created in the writingclass. The image of the writer working alone, typing out words and sentences in a quietmahogany study is not a useful vision of the writing process. While writing certainly has itssolitary, grindstone moments, these moments receive their impetus and direction from peerand mentor support. To illustrate this point I have my students contrast the cover of any givenbook with the acknowledgments page. For example, if I pull a book from my shelf, say, MikeRoses Lives on the Boundary, I see an artistically rendered cover with one name in bold: MikeRose. The acknowledgements page, however, tells a much different story. Rose provides atypical opening to an acknowledgment page: The stories in this book would never have beenwoven together without the help of.... The next two pages read like a list of descendentsfrom the Old Testament.

Peer review is this community for your student writers. And not only that, but all thewonderful things associated with creating a classroom community are invited into your class-room along with peer review such as students interacting with one another in a positivemanner, allowing course materials to be examined and penetrate with inuence, and studentsfeeling that they are a part of the larger academy of learning. Lisa Delpit writes, ...discoursesare not static, but are shaped, however reluctantly, by those who participate within them and

5

by the form of their participation (499). David Bartholomae makes the same point in hisessay Inventing the Universitythat as students participate as a group within the academy,within a particular discourse community, they not only appropriate but are appropriated bysuch discourses. Peer review takes these claims seriously by opening up the spacesignicantspace in terms of both intellectual focus and timewithin the academic institution via thewriting classroom for students to formulate their own conceptions and construct their owndiscourse communities as they simultaneously enter and construct, affect and are effected by,their academic institution.

If you want to teach your students to read like writers, you must utilize peer review. I willmake you a bet. I bet you that the students in any writing class you teach are better at inter-preting than creating. The educational engine that has dropped these students into the desksof your classroom has invested more time and energy into teaching these students how tointerpret a text (i.e., how to recognize symbols, themes, imagery, etc.) and less time teachingthese students how to create a text. As Guy Allen notes, We ask our students to study andunderstand meaning at the same time that we offer little opportunity for them to make originalmeaning (95).

In (Re)Writing Craft Tim Mayers brings clarity to this argument, and his response to this off-kilter educational pendulum is that composition teachers, taking their cue fromcreative writers, must begin teaching craft criticism. Craft criticism does not concern itself,for example, with why Toni Morrison wrote her essay Strangers, or what the theme of theessay is. Craft criticism is wholly concerned with how Toni Morrison wrote her essay. Andbecause writing classes are about the how-tos of writing, I argue that Toni Morrisons essayis going to be practically useless. I could reasonably expect my student writers to read theessay and have something to say about what she does well within the essay. Students mightreference her use of elevated language, her voice as being condent yet accessible, or her abilityto wring a great deal of information out of a sentence. I could not, however, expect them to speak intelligently about where Toni Morrison fails or is ineffective in her essay. Studentsstruggle to see the seams in writing that is nished because nished, published writing is meant to hide such seams, and it is the seams that provide entryway into the process ofwriting.

Picture a dartboard in your mind. The bulls eye represents your students current levelof writing ability and the rings extending outward from the center represent continuouslydeveloping writerly sophistication. Where is Toni Morrison going to fall within this set ofrings? Twenty to thirty rings outward from where your students currently are? Where is anexample student essaythe best essay from last-semesters coursegoing to fall? Where isone of their peers essayssomeone sitting right next to them in classgoing to fall? StephenKing speaks with his usual verve to the point Im trying to make here, the fact that studentwritersall writers for that matterimprove by increments which means the best materialto push us forward is that material closest to our current ability level: Almost everyone canremember losing his or her virginity, and most writers can remember the rst book he/sheput down thinking: I can do better than this. Hell, I am doing better than this! (146, italics orig-inal). Peer review sets students up to read like writers, to deploy craft criticism in which theyidentify the specic techniques that their peers are using to effectively or ineffectively producean argument or story. Peer review does not ask students to interpret the meaning behindwriting but asks students to gure out how a piece of writing is constructed, how it is workingor not working and to provide feedback to that effect. Ive constructed an abbreviated tableto help illustrate the type of questions that the writing classroom concerns itself with asopposed to the English literature classroom:

6 I: Why are collaborative learning and peer review important?

Peer review is as important to the English literature classroom as it is for the writingclassroom, that is, if the given literature classroom is equally concerned with writing as it is with reading. Literature courses most often place heavier emphasis on reading and inter-pretation, however, in which case they deploy different types of peer review systems that focus on reading such as literature circles or readers workshops. It took me a long time torealize that my own English literature background had favored reading over writing. As aproduct of this system I didnt realize this favoritism toward reading until one of my writingteachers, Stuart Dybek, pointed this out to me when I interviewed him as part of my disser-tation:

I think that most of the classes are about reading. One of the things Ive noticed inmy writing classes is that people come in there as very good readers and they want totalk about a piece of writing as readers and what I keep trying to get them to do istalk about it as a piece of writing, how it was made rather than what it means. Youcant talk about something totally disregarding what it means but you can have yourpriorities.

This last line has always resonated with meYou cant talk about something totally disre-garding what it means but you can have your priorities. This sentiment highlights the factthat writing and reading are not discursive practices, rather, they are complementary andinterdependent practices which exist along a type of continuum. You can have your priorities,however, and the writing classroom is one of the few places (if not the only place) where theinstructional priority will be writing rather than reading, where the content of the course willcenter around the development of students writing skills rather than centering around thecourse contentcontent that has been selected and organized long before the students walkinto the classroom.

Peer review teaches students to be aware of an audience through the best means availablean audience. I ask my students who their audience is when they write and they inevitablyrespond, You. Then I get to ask, Who else? Eventually they answer, somewhat bemused,Each other. Yes, I tell them, You are also writing to each other, to your peers and weget to talk about what that means for their writing. Writers envision an audience when theywrite and students write much better papers when they envision their peers as this audiencebecause instead of approximating toward what it is they think I want as the instructor, theyare much better, and more articulate, when they write to inform, amuse, and surprise oneanother.

This may be an unusual turn, but I would like to invoke Peter Elbows essay, Closing

Writing Courses Live and Die by the Quality of Peer Review (Wirtz) 7

Where can the text benet from further detail orexplanation?

What does this author do particularly well thatyou would like to add to your own writingrepertoire?

Where in the text do you, as a reader, get con-fused? Point these out to the writer with sugges-tions for revision.

Pick out a line in the text that you think isworking particularly well and share this linewith the author so that they may continue towrite at this level.

How well does the text match the conditionscalled for in the writing prompt?

Identify the theme(s) of the text. What do you know about the authors personal

history that informs your interpretation of thetext?

What literary devices does this author employ? Pick out three symbols from the text and

explain what they are symbolizing. Compare this text with another text we have

read in terms of its overall tone, theme, and useof symbolism.

Provide a feminist, Marxist, and new-historicistinterpretation of the text.

Writing Classroom Concerns English Literature Classroom Concerns

My Eyes as I Speak: An Argument for Ignoring Audience to support my ideas about theimportant overlap between peer review and audience. Elbow makes the argument in thisheavily anthologized essay that an over-attentiveness to audience can actually inhibit oneswriting. His argument against audience hinges on a very important pointthat the natureof ones audience can either be enabling or inhibiting. In my experience, the audience of onespeers is an enabling audience for students whereas the imagined, dislocated audience of whatthey consider to be good academic writing (aka, what they believe the teacher wants) is often-times an inhibitor. When students write to their peers they tend toward using language wellwithin their capabilities and to privilege clarity of communication. When students write toan imagined, disembodied audience of the teacher or, worse yet, the academy at large, eventhe most simple of thoughts are complicated through a process of linguistic juggling in whichthey struggle to signify that they belong in what is oftentimes a new and unfamiliar academicsetting.

Peer review teaches that there are no right answers. Writing does not operate on the sameplane as mathematical equations, historical dates, or biological identications. Oftentimesthis is confusing for students because of the way other disciplinesand the grading systemin generalcontextualizes writing to make it seem to have an end-goal. As Ann Berthoffillustrates in The Making of Meaning, writing is a process of classication arriving out of chaos.Classication systems, while useful and communicable to wide audiences, are still, at theircore, personal and idiosyncratic. Writing is the deployment of personal systems of classication.Peer review reinforces this notion of the writing process because students are consistently read-ing the way that their peers respond to an identical writing prompt with limitless variety andnuance. Peer review also reinforces the notion that writing is an ongoing process of develop-ment as it supports the idea that the writing classroom is more concerned with the studentsdevelopment as a writer over time than it is about any single particular writing assignment.

Peer review teaches students to take ownership over their writing. Ownership is one ofthose pedagogical terms that has gotten tossed about to such an extent that it has become avague, catch-all term. When I refer to ownership I am referring to a stance that writers takein relation to their work wherein they are both thankful and cautious about the feedback theyreceive. In my writing class this semester I have a student who can serve as the ideal exampleof taking ownership. He gets excited about peer reviewespecially when the criticism chal-lenges himbecause the comments get him excited to go home and work on what needsxing. In this case, his sense of ownership provides him with a sense of condence, a con-dence that allows him to take criticism in a manner that feeds his revision process. Ownershipalso refers to students listening to all of the feedback they receive and then taking the importantnext step of sifting through that feedback with a critical eye, discarding some comments whileimplementing others.

Notice how this type of ownership rarely has a chance without peer review. The commentsthat students receive from their teacher, like it or not, have hierarchical, power-structure bag-gage that most often results in students viewing teacher comments as directives rather thanpossibilities to explore. Peer comments, however, have the opposite effect as these commentsare much more likely to be viewed with a healthy dose of skepticism which, to my thinking,is illustrative of students enacting ownership over their writing.

Peer review maximizes student involvement while minimizingin a smart wayteachinginvolvement. Several years ago I came across a quotation, an aphorism really, that has alwaysstuck with me. The best teachers make themselves progressively unnecessary. The pointhere is certainly not to minimize teacher involvement for the sake of making our lives easier,but that too often beginning teachers take too much of the onus on themselves for student


learning. I have observed many beginning teachers and Ive consistently noted that by the endof the classroom observation it is they, and not the students, who are exhausted. I rememberthis being the case for myself as well when I rst began teaching. Why is this? In my estimation,it is because beginning teachers are still working through a lter where they see themselves asbeing at the center of the activities, at the center of the learning, at the center of the explaining,talking, and doing. An invaluable heuristic for beginning teachers is to stop thinking aboutwhat they will be doing during the course of a classroom period and start thinking about whatthe students will be doing. Peer review is student-centered. Peer review places the onus oflearning on the students. During peer review the utterances of the students vastly outnumbersthe utterances of the teacher. When working as intended, peer review positions the teacheras being progressively unnecessary because the students are appropriately taking on the burdenof learning.

Why Does Peer Review Want to Fail?

If you want quality peer review in your writing classroom then you must face, head-on,the fact that peer review has a natural tendency towards failureit wants to fail. Yes, peerreview wants to fail. The important question to answer becomes, why does peer review wantto fail?

Peer review wants to fail because students dont want to be uncomfortable and they certainlydont want to make others uncomfortable. Imagine that you are a freshman student in a writingcourse. You are asked to read and respond to another students essay. Think about the largercontext of your situation. You are in a new place, trying to nd your own way. One of therules you rely on is be nice to people, thats the way you make friends. Now youve got thiswriting instructor telling you to provide critical feedback. What are you going to do? You aregoing to rely on positive feedback and when your feedback approaches anything resemblingcritical, its going to take the form of quantiable critical feedbackobjective feedback thatcarries little to no emotional currencyand that means pointing out grammatical mistakes.Grammar check is not the sign of successful peer review.

Peer review wants to fail because, like writing, it is a disruptive process. The poet WilliamOlsen helped me to see how peer review and writing are processes that can be frightening forstudents because they require students to reect and subsequently change the way they arecurrently working and thinking. Olsen puts it this way: If youve learned something, if itsan act of discovery, then that means its uprooted prior notions. Theres a disruptive natureto discovery. When somebody writes something good sometimes their rst instinct is actuallyto distrust it, to question it, to consider it a uke because it demands more of them. Studentswill resist peer review and the focused attention to the writing process it supports because itasks them to uproot prior notions, notions that oftentimes have been the same heuristicstheyve relied on for years in order to be successful students. In other words, the writing processand accompanying peer review process are not challenge-free zones. In fact, writing andresponding to writing necessitates candid self-reection that students naturally want to shyfrom, especially students who are simultaneously struggling to adapt in an unfamiliar socialenvironment. A defense mechanism that Ive consistently seen enacted by students new to thecollege experience is to hold on tighter to the familiar. This shows up in students who travelhome every weekend or students who rely solely on well-established friendships. This tendencyto make their suddenly enlarged world a much smaller, manageable, and familiar place unfor-tunately falls into direct opposition with the type of intellectual space we want students toinhabit in our writing classrooms.


Peer review wants to fail because students have been consistently taught not to value oneanother. The most common complaint that students leverage against peer review is generallysome combination of the following statements: Why do I want to know what my peers think?They dont know any more than I do. They dont grade me. I thought it was the teachers jobto give me feedback, arent they supposed to be the experts? Im paying to receive my educationfrom the instructor, not the student next to me. To my thinking this type of attitude alludesto the underlying problem that for the majority of their lives students have been immersedin a schooling system that does not encourage them to view one another as a community oflearners working together. Most of the feedback and all of their grades have been assessed byteachers, parents, and administrators. This entrenched mindset can be a difcult habit to dis-abuse students of when they are asked, through the peer review process, to encourage, critique,and offer suggestions to one another.

Peer review wants to fail because students want to be efcient. Picture the stereotypicalgrade-savvy studentthe one who gets good grades because he or she has learned how tonavigate the system with purpose and efciency. This is the student that argues for an A afterreceiving and A- and is the rst to ask the questions (usually in this order), Will this be col-lected? and How long does it have to be? These grade-savvy students are not bad peoplebut instead have been in education systems long enough to realize the importance of gettingthe best possible grade in the most efcient manner. They have learned not to get overlyinvested in any one given area because they have umpteen other areas to cover. The problemis that peer reviewquality peer reviewrequires an intellectual investment beyond goingthrough the motions. If the majority of students within any given peer review group decideto set the bar of achievement too low, they can effectively nullify any positive effects of peerreview.

Peer review wants to fall off track. I have an anecdote that has stayed with me for severalyears: I was getting coffee at the campus caf and struck up a conversation with a colleaguewho was teaching a writing course similar to my own. At the end of our brief conversationshe told me she had to run, she was actually in the middle of teaching her course as we spoke.This peer review stuff is great, she said, I just get them into groups, get them going, andthen I can run down here to grab some coffee. She was off in a blur to get back to herstudents. Ive noticed this more than once, this misconception that somehow peer review willmaintain itself by virtue of its own inertia. It doesnt work that way. Peer review wants to fallof track because students will try to divide and conquer the work as opposed to putting theircollective intellects together to provide optimal feedback for each writer; peer review wantsto fall off track because some groups end earlier than others which signals to the remaininggroups that their goal should shift from being comprehensive to being nished; peer reviewwants to fall off track because, in all sincerity, students have built-in, highly sensitive radarsthat accurately detect teacher investment levels and as soon as the teacher investment leveldips below their own, the result is a sudden, collective, and absolute retraction of investmenton their part.

How Can You Elevate the Quality of Peer Review?

Ive considered the various ways that peer review can potentially fail in order to set thestage for arguing the importance of the following how-tos. I want to describe how I structurepeer review in order to counter these potential pitfalls.

Peer review is often structured in one of three waysauthor in the group, author outsidethe group, and individual exchange. Each of these has its advantages and, generally, I work


through each in a sequential manner because of how they situate the writer and the type ofresponse he or she receives. Here is a quick explanation of each type of peer review:

1. Author in the group. The author reads aloud his or her paper or the students can rotatethe papers. If the author is going to read his or her paper out loud, its best if theybring 34 copies so that group members can see as well as hear the paper.

2. Author outside the group. Groups gather their papers and exchange with another group.Generally, the level of critique raises when the author is not in the group because stu-dents have an easier time being critical when the author is not sitting across fromthem.

3. Individual exchange. This is a very focused peer review in which students individuallyexchange papers with one another for commentary. The students work independentlyand then meet to discuss the feedback. This places a great deal of onus on each studentto provide in-depth commentary because they do not have the benet of workingwithin a collective group.

Ways to facilitate the process across all 3 types of peer review:Students identify their concerns. This is a rst and necessary step for all peer review sessions.

I give my students time to write out 3 to 5 concerns they have with their paper. I then askstudents to share these concerns and I keep a running list of these concerns on the chalk/white-board. This list of concerns helps reviewers focus their comments. This list of concerns alsohelps the reviewers be more critical since this is feedback that the author has asked for. Themaster list of concerns on the chalk/whiteboard also helps me, as the instructor, to informallyassess what students are having difculty with in relation to the assignment. The master listalso becomes a place for me to clarify concepts. For example, if a student mentions ow asa concern, I can press them to explain what they mean by ow. Eventually, this process ofdening terms helps to create a shared discourse which becomes the backbone of clear com-munication during peer review. Finally, this master list becomes a generative place for peerreview groups to look when they feel they have exhausted their critiques.

Students articulate the changes they made based on peer review feedback and the feedbackthey provided to their peers. My students have to write two paragraphs about these changes atthe end of every major essay that they turn in for teacher commentary. The rst paragraphasks the author to speak to the peer review process in terms of the feedback they received.What were the peer suggestions given to them? How did they incorporate these suggestionsinto their revision process? What feedback did they decide not to incorporate? The secondparagraph asks the author to reect on the feedback they provided for their peersthe moreconcrete and specic the better. I generally ask for at least three specic examples. These twoparagraphs not only help me to assess the quality of the peer review sessions but they helpme facilitate the peer review sessions. For example, I can read over these comments and geta good sense as to how the peer review sessions are working, or not working, for students. Ican make a list of comments that I want to talk over with the whole class, comments that arevalued because they are straight from the students themselves. These two paragraphs also facil-itate the peer review process because I am armed with the language of, Remember, you needto write a paragraph based on the changes youve made to your essay as a result of peer review.That means that you have to offer your peers critical feedback that will help them improvetheir essay and write this paragraph. These two paragraphs oftentimes become the much-needed excuse students need to be more critical with one another.

Exit slips. I have students complete exit slips on most peer review days. Here are a few


examples from my class this week: Based on peer review I will add more citations. I nd thisprocess useful and hope to do it in the future. This tells me a great deal about this studentsince this student had to be told to put away her German homework and a few times I thoughtshe was going to fall asleep. Ive had lively emails from her in the past that demonstrate herengagement in the class but her classroom affect is the oppositeshe looks withdrawn. Thiscomment helps me to theorize/understand that perhaps this student is engaged even thoughshe doesnt show it. Another example: Peer Review: I should focus on other resources andwrite down my own ideas rather than quote from the resources. This is an ESL student whois having difculty keeping up with her native speaking counterparts. This exit slip was heart-ening for me because I fear that her research paper will contain an overreliance on the sources.Im glad that shes getting this information from her peers. Another example: Peer reviewwas a great opportunity to receive criticism that I wouldnt have seen. The review helps reneour papers. This is a positive response with, really, no depth. This is most likely a stockanswerwhat this student thinks I want to hear. Contrast this exit slip with another: Peerreview was helpful. It helped me to see what other literary techniques/styles are effective. Alsohelped me to identify strengths, and what should be left alone. My issue of sticking to mythesis was resolved. Much more content herespecic, identiable results from the peerreview session which demonstrates in a concrete manner the progress that this student wasable to make.

Another advantage to the use of exit slips is that they support my idea of maximizingstudent output while minimizing teacher output. I read these exit slips at the end of classafter all the students have shufed out of the classroom. Reading these exit slips takes me threeminutes and they are quite enjoyable. They require no response and what they provide interms of informally assessing peer reviewas well as a check against students not staying ontask during the peer review sessionvastly outweighs the time and effort I have to invest.This is teacher efciency in one of its nest forms.

Float like a buttery, sting like a bee. Be available to answer any questions that arise duringpeer review but when a student hand goes up, you want to get in and out as quickly as possible.A raised hand is not the call for an elaborate lecture or even discussion. Peer review is theirtime to work as a group and a raised hand is a call to put some wind into the sails, not grabthe steering wheel. Another tactic that I like to use is watch one group while listening to another.Circulating throughout the classroom is a good strategy to see if students are on task but Ivefound that whichever group I happen to stop and observe is a group that will quickly be ontask given the fact that Im watchinga type of Heisenberg uncertainty principle of thewriting classroom. I have found it much more informative to watch one group while listeningin on another group. I get a more realistic picture of how groups are operating when theydont think Im observing.

Your secret weapon: Quality peer review doesnt ever end. One of the difculties inherentnot only in peer review group work but within group work writ large is that some groups willnish earlier than others. This creates a problem because the group that is nished is, by de-nition, off task and on to talking about their weekends or the math test they have coming up.The other problem is that the groups surrounding them that are not yet nished will feel theneed to hasten the process which undoubtedly detracts from the endeavor. This is when youhave to put yourself to the test. While oating like a buttery, you should be able to determinewhere each group is within the process. When a group nishes, you want to be there, talkingto them about the process and looking over what theyve recommended to their writers. Whenyou read at the end of an essay that the group wrote the comment, Good work here but morespecic examples would help to support your arguments you get to push this group to be


more specic about where these additional examples should be within the essay and thinkabout what the examples should be. This is where the master-list of concerns on thechalk/whiteboard can be your ally as well. Your secret weapon against group-interaction-failure is the simple fact that peer review can always be qualied further. You, as the bee, needto quickly determine how to push these early-nishing groups to articulate their ideas in amore sophisticated and developed manner.

Continually alter group dynamics. I prefer to look at the class holistically and my loftygoal is that each of my students will feel comfortable relatively early on in the semester withevery one of their peers. I also prefer to continually alter group dynamics rather than keepinggroup formations static because I dont want one or two groups consistently working wellwhile others struggle. I encourage my students to be exible with one another and to worksuccessfully with a variety of people. This type of social intelligence and social exibility isone of the hallmark outgrowths of quality peer review.

Good peer review comes from good writing assignments and good writing assignments are stu-dent-centered. Student-centered writing assignments are writing assignments that are open-ended so that students can identify a topic of interest within the structures provided throughthe writing prompt. Providing choice fosters investment in the writing process and is true tothe way writing evolves out of a desire to communicate an issue, argument, story, or idea feltstrongly by the writer. I noted earlier that one of the inherent problems with peer review isthat, like writing, it is a disruptive process that uproots prior notions of self. On the otherside of the coin, however, lies the generative perspective that People want to make meaningeven though it involves risk and makes intense demands of the maker (Allen 98). If thewriting assignment is student-centered, if the students are allowed choice and the freedom toself-select the topics they want to spend their time with, then I believe student writers arebetter positioned to enjoy the struggle and personal changes associated with writing and peerreview.

Peer review days are NOT rst draft days. Ive had more than one peer review session goawry because too many students showed up with incomplete drafts. In order for peer reviewto work effectively students need to have completed full drafts. How does one know whenthey have a complete full draft? The author must have arrived at a stopping pointa pointwhere they feel they have either nished writing or where they dont know how to proceed.These stopping points are important, fertile ground for productive peer review. The problemwith students peer reviewing drafts that have not reached such stopping points is that feedbackreceived will be met with resistance in the form of, Yes, thats what I was planning to do orWell, Im not nished yet so the feedback I have received isnt relevant to what I havent writ-ten. Worse yet, student writers will feel the need to speak at length as to what they planto do, leaving their peers in an awkward place to review what is written. Without being ableto focus on the paper in hand, student reviewers are left with little traction to offer any sortof specic, substantive critique.

Teacher comments invigorate peer review. Teacher comments set the bar for student-to-student comments. If we want our students to offer one another critical feedback that pushestoward rewriting and revising on a global rather than local scale, then the writing instructormust model such feedback. (See Nancy Sommers Revision Strategies of Student Writers andExperienced Adult Writers to visit the differences between local, grammatical revision practicesand global, re-writing, re-visioning practices). In order to push students toward rewriting andrevising, the writing instructor must provide evaluative rather than ranked feedback. PeterElbow makes the point in his essay, Ranking, Evaluating, and Liking: Sorting Out ThreeForms of Judgment. Evaluating takes the form of identifying places for improvement and


noticing places of uency within a student essay whereas ranking (i.e., assigning a grade) nar-rows both the teachers and students gaze onto the grade itself (390). I spent too many yearsas a writing teacher constructing my comments to justify a grade as opposed to coaching stu-dents along the revision process. To aid my position of coach rather than justier of thegrade, there are three practices that Ive come to rely on:

1. Before students hand in their essays to me for commentary, I ask them to re-read therst page of their essay, looking closely for any grammatical mistakes. If they nd any,they should correct them. The result : I only have to review the rst page for gram-matical mistakes. If I nd any on the rst page, I know that the student does not knowthe grammatical rule that should be applied. If I nd grammatical mistakes on theremaining pages, I can still note them but I can consider these oversights rather than alack of understanding the grammatical rule. This practice helps me to read student essaysfor their ideas as opposed to reading student essays with one eye on their grammar.

2. Before students hand in their essays to me for commentary, I ask them to write a briefparagraph explaining what they believe to be their essays greatest strength and greatestweakness. Quite honestly, I cant remember how I responded to student essays withouthaving this paragraph. What students write as to their strength and weakness opensthe conversation that I continue when I respond to the student essays. Most often, Ind myself agreeing with their comments, which places me in the position of offeringand coaching strategies to help build on their perceived strengths and manage theirperceived weaknesses.

3. The two previous practices are more immediate to the given writing event at hand.This third practice is more global and helps shape the entire writing classroom: theuse of a portfolio system (see Doug Hess essay, Portfolio Standards for English 101for further discussion on using portfolios in your writing classroom). Nancy Welchmakes the argument that:

Composition teachers by and large havent been asking questions like Somethingmissing, something else? that promote revision as getting restless with familiar andconstrictive ways of writing and being, as creating. We respond instead (so a lookthrough recent classroom texts suggests) in ways that restrict revision to a narrow-ing of focus, the correction of an inappropriate tone or awkward repetition, thechanging of any passage that might confuse, mislead, or irritate readers [207].

The portfolio system helps to create the space for our comments to take the shape of pushingtoward rewriting and revising because the portfolio system extends the date of nal publicationto the end of the semester when students get to hand in a collection of their rened, best work.As a writing teacher then, I get to comment on student essays with the nal portfolio in mind,writing comments that begin with When revising for the nal portfolio I suggest....

Peer review is a routine that takes place over the entire semester. I observed a beginningteacher recently who was having her students work with tableaus. I have to admit, I had neverseen this done before but I did think it was a novel idea. The teacher had four volunteer stu-dents go up to the front of the class to be the actors. The rest of the class took turns readingparagraphs aloud from a short story that she had handed out. The job of the audience was totell the students what scene to depict after every few paragraphs. The audience of studentshad to decide, rst, what scene was the most signicant and, second, how to depict this scenegiven the four actors in the front of the room. This is a visualization exercise that related togood reading and writing habitsthat of visualizing and subsequently describing charactersactions. The problem with this tableau activity, however, became immediately apparent: the


students had never done anything like this before. The students hadnt grasped the rules ofthe activity before the teacher was trying to push them toward using the activity to developand depict their understanding. In our post-observation conference I asked the beginningteacher what she had thought of the lesson and she responded, Well I now know not to dothat activity again. Her exasperation was the exact opposite of my feelings. The class showedme that this activity needed to be done again, and again, and again because I understood thatthe failure of today was the fact that the students didnt know how to do this new activityyet. Theres an amusing joke that illustrates the same concept from the opposite viewpoint.A beginning elementary school teacher takes the time to observe one of his more experiencedpeers. What he sees astounds him. The veteran teacher begins his class by playing a song andas soon at the students hear this song they quickly and quietly take out their workbooks andsit at their desks, pencils ready. Later in the lesson the veteran teacher plays a different songand the students put away their materials and all sit on the oor in a circle for reading time.Finally, another song gets played and all the students line up at the door in single le, readyto walk down the hall together toward the cafeteria. The veteran teacher marches them to thecafeteria and comes back to the classroom, asking the beginning teacher what he learned: Ilearned that I need to get a copy of those songs!

How are these anecdotes related to peer review? In the rst anecdote we have a beginningteacher trying out a new strategy. She thinks of abandoning this new strategy because it doesntwork the rst time out. Peer review will most often not work the rst time out. Complexsmall group organizational systems need to be revisited and rened again and again beforethey will work successfully. In the second anecdote the complexity of the classroom strat-egyits history of revisions and renementswas lost on the beginning teacher. It is impor-tant that peer review be conceived as developing over time just as these anecdotes reveal theimportance of viewing any complex classroom strategy as developing over time. As an example,peer review is different depending on when in the semester it is taking place. At the very least,try dividing peer review mentally into thirds over the course of the semester. The very rstpeer review should be markedly different from the last peer review of the semester. If youadopt the position that you can tweak and work on different aspects of peer review over time,this frees you from worrying about peer review falling at on any particular day. In the thickof a peer review session, think about the process happening both immediately and incremen-tally over the course of the semester.

Throw out the rules. This is my nal point: Please dont be afraid to throw out the ruleswhen students inevitably nd ways to adapt small group work to t their needs as writers.For example, students will eventually nd ways to augment peer review such as having theauthor take part in the conversation earlier than they are supposed to, or they will decide todivide up the papers and read individually before convening as a group, or they will (in a bestcase scenario) decide to peer review on their own time outside of the classroom via face-to-face or electronic communication which, in turn, alters the in-class peer review dynamic. Ihave found that as long as a group can articulate a justication of their actions, I let them be.These types of modications usually take place in the latter half to nal third of the semesterafter students have thoroughly acclimated to the strategies for peer review that I initiallymodel.

Whats Next?

Essays often end by answering this question: whats next? Ironically I nd this questionbest answered by a return, a return to why I decided to teach writing in the rst place. I teach


writing because I enjoy working with and learning from students and because I believe in thetransformative effects of writingeffects that can be accelerated in a well designed, differen-tiated, student-centered classroom. I am also hooked on scholarship associated with the writingprocess. Whether in the thicket or on the eve of a semester, reminding myself of these in-the-marrow beliefs helps me to answer: whats next? And so I leave off by asking you to thinkthrough whats next. I have sought to articulate my current ways of structuring peer reviewbut as with any complex small-group process these structures are not meant to be compre-hensive or static. I offer my conception of peer review as a type of trope that you may pickup and extent according to the needs of your students and your own evolving in-the-marrowbeliefs about the teaching of writing.

Works CitedAllen, Guy. Language, Power, and Consciousness: A Writing Experiment at the University of Toronto. In

Johnson, 6598. Print.Bartholomae, David. Inventing the University. In Johnson, 231. Print.Berthoff, Ann. The Making of Meaning: Metaphors, Models and Maxims for Writing Teachers. Portsmouth,

NH: Heinemann, 1981. Print.Delpit, Lisa. The Politics of Teaching Literate Discourse. In Johnson 491502. Print.Dybek, Stuart. Personal interview. 28 April 2008.Elbow, Peter. Closing My Eyes as I Speak: An Argument for Ignoring Audience. In Johnson, 172194.

Print.Hess, Douglas. Portfolio Standards for English 101. In Johnson, 407415. Print.Johnson, T.R., ed. Teaching Composition: Background Readings. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2008. Print.King, Stephen. On Writing. New York: Scribner, 2000. Print.Morrison, Toni. Strangers. Back to the Lake. Ed. Thomas Cooley. New York: W.W. Norton, 2009. 9597.

Print.Murray, Don. Teach Writing as a Process not Product. Villanueva, 36. Print.Olsen, William. Personal Interview. 11 April 2008.Rose, Mike. Lives on the Boundary. New York: Penguin Books, 1989. Print.Mayers, Tim. (Re)Writing Craft. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005. Print.Sommers, Nancy. Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers. Villanueva, 43

54. Print.Villanueva, Victor ed. Cross-Talk in Comp Theory. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1997. Print.Welch, Nancy. Toward and Excess-ive Theory of Revision. In Johnson, 207246. Print.


Bringing New Perspectivesto a Common Practice:A Plan for Peer Review

ANTHONY EDGINGTON

My group didnt offer much feedback on my paper. I really wanted to hear more aboutmy argument, but they really didnt say anything about it.

I know my introduction is weak, but my group didnt write any comments about it.So, I didnt revise it before turning in the nal draft.

Some of my group members said the paper was good. I dont know what that means!Why is it good? What did they like about it? I wanted to know more about their reactions tomy paper.

Today, it would strike an observer as odd to nd a writing classroom that did not involvesome level of peer response or peer review. Pedagogically, most teachers promote the value ofhaving students read and respond to each others texts. Various teacher narratives and researchstudies argue that peer review allows writers to obtain a greater sense of audience (Lamberg;Newkirk), enhances student attitudes toward writing (Fox; Chaudron), and opens up teacherresponse to more global issues in student papers while also saving the teacher valuable instruc-tion timepresumably since students will often catch early draft errors, allowing the teacherto respond to more specic issues in a student paper (Beaven; Moore). Signicant theoreticalsupport for the practice has been outlined in various studies; for example, Jette G. Hansonand Jun Liu argue that, peer response is supported by several theoretical frameworks, includingprocess writing, collaborative learning theory, Vygotskys Zone of Proximal Development,and interaction and second language acquisition (SLA) (31). So ubiquitous is the activitythat we now nd research in such disciplines as mathematics, business, chemistry, and nursingthat supports the use of peer response for writing assignments in those classes.

Yet, for instructors in composition, the quotations offered earlier are still common whenspeaking with students about their reections on peer review in the classroom. For manyinstructors and students, peer review can be seen as a limited and limiting activity. CharlotteBrammer and Mary Rees nd that we [the authors] frequently hear students complain bitterlythat peer review is a waste of time or blame their peers for not catching all the mistakes (71).Ronald Barron, in offering advice on the qualities that will lead to successful peer responsesessions, argues that writers need to keep track of the questions and concerns they have abouttheir paper; otherwise, students may get shotgun responses, random responses which might

17

help them revise, but which more often than not seem to miss the very areas where the writersneed help (30). In his comprehensive article on response, Richard Haswell hypothesizes thateven with peer-response methods, disillusionment has been setting in, though perhaps lesswith teachers than with students who are sick of so much of it (2006). And, Mary Holt, indiscussions with graduate students and fellow faculty members, argues that she more oftenhears about the problems associated with students use of peer responsesuch as hastilywritten comments, a limited focus on style and grammatical issues, and the subjective natureof the student responderthan on the benets of the activity (384).

Given this abundance of research, and after ten years of teaching introductory andadvanced writing classes, I can honestly say that peer review has been both the most rewardingand the most frustrating activity that occurs in my classrooms. Rewarding because it offersstudents a chance to receive multiple perspectives on their texts and emphasizes the need forboth critical reading and revision in the writing classroom. And, it has changed the way thatI read student texts, allowing me to focus more on paper content and student revision than Idid in the past. However, it is the frustrations associated with peer review that often continueto affect many instructors (including my) views on the practice. Speaking with fellow teachersand reecting on my own experiences, a range of problems emerge associated with the activity.Students often do not come prepared for the sessions or bring a text that is not ready to bereviewed by peers. While teachers usually see the value in peer review and speak enthusiasticallyabout it, students do not always bring the same enthusiasm to these sessions; I often ndmyself shaking my head as I watch a group of four to ve students stand up and leave twentyto twenty-ve minutes after starting the review, announcing that they have nished for theday. Students may exhibit different behaviors during peer review sessions: some dominatepeer review sessions, either taking up a majority of the time with questions about their paperor offering wave after wave of criticism about peers papers; some refuse to offer criticismbecause they do not feel condent enough in their ability to do so; and some listen intentlyto what their peers have to say and then simply disregard the advice when they begin theprocess of revising the paper, relying only on what the teacher has offered as feedback. In herresearch study, Sarah W. Freedman found that teachers and students lamented the use of peerresponse because of the over-use of vague and uninformative student comments when respond-ing to peers papers. Speaking of his experiences in English as Second Language classrooms,Paul Rollinson further argues that

Teachers may question its [peer reviews] value within their particular context, orwonder how such a time consuming activity can be reconciled with course or exami-nation constraints. Students may have even more doubts: they are uncertain about itspurpose and advantages, they may feel instinctively that only a better writer ... isqualied to judge or comment on their written work. They may feel that feedbackreceived from classmates whose English level is more or less the same as theirs is apoor alternative to the real thingthat is, the teachers periodic red-penned nota-tions [23].

Most illuminating for me has been the discussions I have had with students about peerreview during our student-teacher conferences. Not all students spoke of frustrations withpeer review, voicing instead their satisfaction with peer feedback. These students spoke ofproductive discussions about their papers and pointed to areas where they had revised theirwork based on this feedback. These students often mentioned that they were active duringthe review of their papers, asking questions and pushing reviewers for more suggestions. Theseconversations reminded me of times when I watched peer groups enjoying the process; attimes, these groups would require a small nudge from me to get them to wrap up the session


at the end of the class period. However, I also watched and listened during conferences asstudents spoke about the lack of communication they received from their peers, noting thatothers did not take the activity seriously or offered only vague comments of praise abouttheir texts. These students would plead with me to be placed in other groups and, sometimes,to reconsider if future peer review sessions should be held. When asked whether they askedfor additional feedback or offered peers questions to consider, most argued that it would nothave mattered since the peers would not have offered any assistance anyway. Thus, what beganto stand out the most for me, both in the enthusiastic as well as in the frustrated comments,was that sessions worked best when the writer became involved, asking questions and pushingpeer reviewers to look deeper or in different ways at their texts. When peer review did notwork, it often was because writers were not active members, instead choosing to either outlinetheir concerns with peer review to me during our conferences or to resist revising the paperbased on peer feedback.

For this essay, I discuss three pedagogical changes in my classroom that have led to moreproductive peer review sessions. First, signicant time is spent preparing students for peerreview; instead of simply putting students in groups and waiting for review to happen, studentsin my course go through a one to two day class sequence that discusses past peer review expe-riences, models successful peer review strategies, and offers the opportunity for practice withsample student texts. Second, noting the importance of the writer, the Writers Worksheetwas constructed as a way of creating a more active writer during peer review sessions. Theworksheet offers the writer the chance to address her questions during the review and, perhapsmore importantly, puts control of the review in the writers hand. Finally, when respondingto student texts after the peer review, my comments include a focus on peer reviewers com-ments, highlighting the many places where I often agree with the peers on their assessmentof the paper. By focusing on peer comments, my goal is to increase the authority of thesecomments in the future. These three small changes have led to more successful peer reviewsessions in my classes.

Peer Review PreparationBarron, while emphasizing the importance of peer review, acknowledges the early prob-

lems he had in his classrooms when using it :

But response groups have not always worked well for me. When I rst used them,they were failures because I merely assigned students to groups and expected them toknow what to do. I did not teach them how to use response groups effectively. Thecritical factor in determining the success or failure of the method is what happensbefore students get into their groups to read each others papers. The groups bythemselves are not a panacea [24].

Pamela Flash echoes Barrons experience, arguing that inadequate structure and an absenceof modeling can cause [peer] groups to ounder, wasting valuable class time (Teaching withWriting). Looking back at problems experienced in my past courses with peer review, I rec-ognize that my approach was similarly awed. My belief was that most students probably hadexperience reviewing anothers paper and would enthusiastically embrace the idea of havingfeedback on their own texts; so instead of devoting time to explaining the procedure andpreparing students for the work, I instead spent a few minutes before the review explainingthe process and then placed students into groups for the review sessions. Any problems wouldbe explained away as anomalies while I continued to blindly believe that peer review wasworking in my courses.

Bringing New Perspectives to a Common Practice (Edgington) 19

After a few courses and several of the aforementioned student-teacher conferences, Ibegan to recognize the students lack of experience with and knowledge about peer review inmy classes. I found that most students had not participated in the practice in previous highschool or college courses and felt that they had no direction in how to approach the task.Instead, they relied on vague and non-critical feedback when reviewing peers texts; withoutguidance on how to approach reading and responding, students fell back on practices that,in their opinions, would do less harm. Brammer and Rees study of peer review at one universityfound that preparation for peer review there was also lacking; teachers reported that, on aver-age, they spent less than half of one period preparing students for peer review. And, the prepa-ration was often limited to lecture or handouts, with an occasional group reading session ona sample student paper, methods that the authors see as insufcient ... for demonstrating thecollaborative value of peer review (81). Not surprisingly, students at that university respondedthat peer review was not very helpful to them as writers. Brammer and Rees conclude thatprofessors must invest a great deal of class time to ensure a productive peer review (81).

Thus, in order to create a more productive environment, I designed a series of activitiesthat transformed the way students learned about and experienced peer review in my classroom.In designing these activities, I was inuenced by three pre-training areas introduced byRollinson: awareness raising (which is informing students about the principles and objectivesof peer response); productive group interaction (creating a comfortable, supportive atmospherefor peer review); and productive response and revision (walking students through basic prin-ciples of critical reading, response to writing, group dialogue and dynamics, and revision)(27). The focus of my peer review preparation classes shifted to developing a stronger, moreproductive way of introducing students to useful strategies for the reviewing they would beasked to do. Depending upon the class, this preparation could take one or two class periods.For many instructors, incorporating one or two days to preparing for peer review in theircourse syllabi can be difcult. However, as the research points out, creating a stronger peerreview environment in your classroom can save time later in a course, including the time ittakes you to respond to student papers and the time it takes for you to re-educate studentson peer review procedures. My recent experience validates these arguments and has emphasized,for me, the importance of introducing students to peer review through multiple steps.

The preparation begins with a discussion of past experiences students have had withreceiving commentary on their texts. Hansen and Liu point to the advantages of these dis-cussions, arguing that conversing about prior experiences helps the teacher understand stu-dents concerns or attitudes toward peer review and can lead on to a discussion of classroomnorms and interaction patterns expected from the students in the particular class or culturalsetting (33). I usually start the discussion with two short questions: What was the best com-ment you have ever received on a past paper you wrote? What was the worst comment youever received on a past paper you wrote? (I purposely do not ask for these to be commentsreceived from peers; as I previously discovered, many students have not had signicant expe-rience with peer review in high school or early college classes). I ask students to explain whythey saw these as strong and weak comments. Past comments that Ive received include detailedcomments praising signicant changes in the students writing; questions that ask the studentto probe deeper into his or her research or argument; vague comments that appear to questionmore the students ability to complete the task than the success or failure of the paper; andeven no comments (i.e., the instructor hands back the paper with only a grade and no writtencommentary). After placing several of these on the board, we spend time talking about themas a class, focusing on the strengths and weaknesses of each and how weaker comments couldbe made stronger. At this point, I begin to move the class into a conversation towards dening


what constitutes critical commentary, especially pointing out that critical commentary does nothave to point out every fault in the paper, nor does it have to be abrasive or demeaning. Usually,the conversation then turns to addressing issues of tying comments directly to the text, offeringmore explanation for some comments, and introducing the value of positive comments as onemoves beyond just writing this is good. In my freshman writing classes, signicant time isspent on this nal point, as many students have difculty with addressing what is working wellin peers papers and understanding how to use these comments in future revisions and/or thecreation of future papers. As Hansen and Liu further suggest, it is vital to prepare students toask questions that generate a response from the writer, and that are revision-oriented so thatthere is a meaningful discussion about the content, rhetoric, or grammar of the paper (36).This rst class discussion helps to clarify which comments work and which may not.

After discussing previous peer review comments, my classes usually move into a shbowlactivity, usually during a second class period (see Meier; Neubert and McNelis). Prior to theactivity, I choose four students who will be good models to watch during a mock peer review.These are not necessarily the best writers in class, but rather students who will put the timeand effort into reading and responding to a peers text. The students and I meet to walkthrough how peer review occurs (including the use of the Writers Worksheet, which is dis-cussed in the next section). When time permits, these fours students and I will participate ina mock peer review, stopping at times to discuss different methods, strategies, and techniques.The peer group is then given a short sample text to read over prior to the next class period.When the time for the shbowl activity arrives, the small group sits in the middle of theroom, with one student serving as the writer of the text and the other three as reviewers. Theclass watches the review and takes notes on what they see and hear. Usually, the review itselftakes fteen to twenty minutes, after which the class discusses their reactions to the session.As the discussion progresses, I push students to connect the comments they heard during thereview to the strong and weak comments mentioned during the previous class session. Wealso reect on the silent moments of peer review. What should the writer do while peers readthe paper? How important are listening skills during peer review? What reection should takeplace after the peer review has ended? Students are asked to consider what role the writer tookduring the review and if the writer needed to be more or less active. Finally, the class focuseson the dynamics of the group. How was turn-taking enacted among the members? Who con-trolled the group agenda? Were there places where the discussion encountered obstacles? Byfocusing on different aspects of peer review, including the role of the writer and how the groupmembers work together during a peer review session, students begin to recognize the impor-tance of the non-writing related aspects of peer review.

Finally, after discussing commentary and group dynamics, the class is ready to try theirhand at peer review. This normally occurs during a second class period (after the shbowlactivity). I begin by placing students together in groups of three to four (I have found thatmore than four members in a peer group causes too much repetition in comments and forcesthe group to move more quickly through papers in order to t everyone in during the allottedtime period). All the groups get the same sample student paper, usually one a past studenthas given me permission to use. The paper I use for this session is usually one of averagequality, written well enough to be understood but containing some signicant problems inargument, development, organization, and/or grammar. The groups are asked to read thesample and respond back to it silently rst, noting strengths, weaknesses, and confusions.After each student has nished his/her reading and response, the group talks about the paperand looks closely at the responses offered, deciding which of their comments are productive,which would need to be rewritten, and which may need to be eliminated. From this discussion,

Bringing New Perspectives to a Common Practice (Edgington) 21

they develop one overall group response to the paper from their individual responses. Eachgroup, then, discusses their combined response to the paper with the rest of the class, notingalso the process the group went through in developing this response (this discussion oftenfocuses on the discussions the group had while deciding which comments to keep and whichto discard). The activity helps to emphasize much of the work done during the previous twoactivities but also stresses the importance of group response during peer review; while eachmember is responding back to the writers text, it is a group response that the writer will even-tually take with him/her for revision. Finally, this time to practice peer review gives studentsa chance to experience the dynamics that occur during a peer review session (including howto handle peers that dominate discussions, peers who resist offering feedback, and the overallrelationships that develop among reviewers) and to ask me questions about the process.

After this mock review, time is spent discussing more practical aspects of peer review,such as

How much of a draft should be completed before the review (my usually response isthat the more you have done, the more you can have read and reviewed, but alsostating that arriving with a draft slightly under the required page limit can be helpfulfor future revision),

The number of drafts to bring (for my classes, this is always the same number as peergroup members, without forgetting a copy for themselves), and

Time management issues (to ensure that each students paper receives adequate reviewtime, I usually suggest no more than 20 minutes on one paper).

The Writers Worksheet is also introduced and explained at this time, as I stress that the writerwill be expected to run the review on his/her paper (more on this in the next section and Appen-dix). Overall, the two classes prior to the rst peer review session provide signicant structurefor students, introducing important ideas and activities that will guide peer review for theremainder of the semester. As their instructor, it offers me a chance to hear more about theirprevious experiences with review and to anticipate possible problems that may occur later inthe class. But, perhaps more importantly, this preparation leads to a greater understanding ofwriting and revision among the students in my classroom. I have found that the time put intopeer review preparation has led to more experienced and condent writers while allowing meto focus on larger issues in student texts during my own commentary. While time-consuming,these activities have created a more peer review-friendly atmosphere in my college classes.

Writers Worksheet

As mentioned earlier, a recurring problem during previous peer review sessions was thatsome writers often felt they did not receive back adequate or appropriate feedback on theirpapers. Meeting with students in conferences or reading over student reections, I noted howoften students were critical of the feedback their peers offered when reviewing each otherspapers, noting that many of these comments were vague and uninformative (i.e. this is goodor you have an A paper here) or comments the writer saw as abusive or highly critical (i.e.,you need to learn how to use a dictionary or you are completely wrong about your thoughtson this issue). While at times this criticism about peer feedback was unfounded, since I laterdiscovered that peers had offered effective feedback (more on this issue in the next section),my observations of peer review sessions and analysis of peer comments did conrm that somepeers were resistant or reluctant to offer feedback or focused more on lower order concernsinstead of the overall argument or content of the paper.


However, these observations also highlighted the lack of participation among many ofthe writers during the sessions. When peers offered vague or confusing feedback, writers wouldrarely ask for more information or clarication. When peers focused more on lower orderissues, writers would either accept the revisions without question or offer a statement likeyea, I know I need to x that stuff before I turn it in. Thus, it seemed that writers werecontent to take this unproductive feedback as is and chalk up the experience to being placedinto a poor peer group. Later discussions during student-teacher conferences, when I askedwriters about their participation (or lack thereof ) in the sessions, emphasized this view aswriters argued that asking for more feedback was pointless since they did not expect to getanything else from their peers.

My rst attempt at changing this environment focused on creating more detailed work-sheets, where peers were asked to focus on and respond to four to ve specic areas of the textas they read. The use of worksheets during peer review sessions has been spoken of highly inpast research on the activity (Neubert and McNelis; Barron; Samson and McCrea), and asimple Google search for peer review and worksheet will bring back dozens of onlineexamples. The worksheets were often tied to the assignment that students were currently writ-ing and focused on mainly content and organizational issues. For example, for a commentaryassignment that asked students to choose a controversial issue and write an editorial about it,the worksheet contained some of the following questions:

Has the writer considered opposing views on the topic? If not, what are some viewshe/she should consider?

Has the writer incorporated emotional appeals (pathos) into the text? What are someother emotional appeals that could be included?

Is the commentary organized in a way that is clear and understandable?

Other assignments may contain different types of questions (for example, a more descriptiveassignment like a memoir would focus more on the inclusion of strong details, background,and/or dialogue).

During the session, peer reviewers were to read the writers paper, place some notes andcomments on the worksheet, and

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