Peer Response

Throughout reading Nancie Atwell’s guidelines for conducting conferences, I kept thinking to myself that so much of her advice seemed to be common sense information. However, after thinking about it a little more, I realized that although it is common sense, they are all things that teachers probably would not do. For example, the piece of advice that I thought about the most was asking for permission to write on a student’s paper. I realized that I would probably take writing on a student’s paper as something that I was simply entitled to do, because I am the teacher. However, I would never just take anyone else’s paper and write on it so why does it make sense for me to do that to a student? I think that many times teachers have a tendency to forget that their students are also people and as a result, they treat them differently than they do anyone else in their lives. This same idea is evident in when Atwell said to avoid generalized praise. She went on to explain that no where outside of the classroom would it be acceptable for us to tell someone “very good!” and not elaborate any more. Instead, we would have a real conversation with that person and treat that person like a “human being.” I guess teachers do have a tendency to look at their students as students and not realize that they are people who happen to be students, which I think sets both the teacher and the students up for failure. If the teacher can’t see her students as humans, they will never respect her and she will never be able to form a relationship with them. Anyway, since this is a little off the topic of writing instruction, I will move on . . . 

I love the idea of using peer response in the classroom. Throughout high school, I think that almost every single paper I wrote went through some sort of peer response session. However, with all of this peer responding, I don’t ever recall being explicitly taught how to respond to a peer’s writing. Because of this, I remember a lot of peer review sessions being really unproductive. Everyone read their paper out loud and the other people in the group just said the first thing that came to mind in order to be done with the session as soon as possible. I don’t ever remember getting writing advice from a fellow classmate that I actually used (and to be fair, I don’t ever remember giving a fellow classmate any advice I would have used either). So I definitely agree that responding to peers’ writing on a higher level needs to be taught; it’s not a skill that students will simply pick up, even if they can read and write well. I really like the idea of bringing in a piece of your own writing and using it as a model to teach your students how to respond. Not only does it serve as a good model for responding to writing, it also helps to validate students’ ideas, especially if you follow-up on the lesson and show your students how you revised it taking in to account their suggestions. 

My link for the week is actually a list of guidelines for conducting peer response sessions from the University’s Writing Center. Of course, it is geared for a University writing class, but I think that many of the guidelines could directly transfer to high school. What I thought was particularly helpful was the section titled “What will make peer response workshops fail?” that brings up a lot of considerations that teachers might overlook when planning a peer response workshop.