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[ Music ]
>> Well, I-- peer review, it's a-it's a-- an absolutely--
it's integral to the writing classroom as-- as I see it.
It's, you know, writing is inherently social,
as one of the core concepts indicates.
And that means that students work together
on their writing in a variety of ways.
But I'm make a distinction between peer review.
I call it peer response really.
I don't like the term review, and I make a distinction
between that and what many people refer to as peer editing.
And the reason that I make that distinction is
because I don't see peer response
as inherently evaluative.
The students are not saying this is good or not.
They're certainly not correcting each other's essays,
and many of them come into my class thinking that's what
working together is.
That's what it means to be in a peer response group.
To my mind, peer response is about a small community
of writers working together
to help each other solve the rhetorical problems
for that writing task.
And so, their job is to read one another's essays and respond
to it as readers, not to say your introduction is good,
or you made a mistake
in paragraph three, or it's disorganized.
But to say, here's what I'm-- here's my reaction to your text.
I agree with this, or this was really interesting,
or I didn't know this, I have further questions about that.
And so, the idea of the peer response group is for students
to get the experience as readers of writing and progress,
but for writers, to hear what their audience is seeing
in their text as they're developing that text over time.
I often say to doctoral TAs and less experienced teachers
of writing that the primary purpose of peer--
peer response activities is not necessarily
to produce a better finished essay for the writer,
but to help the readers-- the readers in that group learn more
about what it means to engage in the development
of writing an effective text.
So I don't expect that just because I have kids
in peer review, or peer response groups,
that their essays are necessarily going to be better,
because by definition they're novices.
I would be-- if I were only interested in that,
I would be the best reader in the class
because I have the most experience as a writer.
But if I did that, they don't get that experience
of responding to one another's text.
Not for the sake of saying this is good or bad, but for the sake
of saying here's what I'm hearing in your text.
Here's how the rhetorical situation sounds to me.
So, I want them to learn how to read writing in progress and how
to think like writers, rather than how
to help one another create a better text.
I think that's a really important distinction and it's,
I think it's-- it's one that is not often made,
and so when kids come out of high school
into the college classroom,
they don't have any experience talking
about writing in progress.
They don't-- they're afraid to talk about one another's essays
because they think that their job is to say this is good
or this is not good, and that's not what a peer response
activity is in my mind.
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The primary tool that I use is the discussion board
on Blackboard.
You could use any sort of a discussion board.
There are many of them that are out there on the web.
Our university-- my university happens to use Blackboard
and so what I do is to set up a separate open discussion forum
for each of the writing groups in the class.
And that discussion forum becomes a place for students
to post all of their drafts, so their--
their group members can have access to those.
They comment on one another's drafts, so not only do they talk
in class together, but they write comments to one another
which I have access to because I have access
to all the discussion boards, and therefore I can capture some
of the discussion that I couldn't capture in class,
because I can't be at five
or six writing groups simultaneously.
So, it's a good time, I think, when it comes
to teaching writing because we've got these tools
that allow us to do things that we've been doing for many,
many years, but which in some ways might be invisible to us.
So back to the peer review thing.
Blackboard helps me capture parts of that
that I wouldn't see as an instructor.
And it also creates a record for the students,
so that if they talked about something in September,
they have access to that entire thread
in December or in November.
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You can't assume that students know how to talk about writing
in progress, and so if you just put kids into groups
and give them a task that is either unfamiliar to them
or that they're unprepared for, the--
the groups are going to fail.
The kids are going to sort of flounder around,
not really know what to do.
And I often hear teachers-- teachers I work with in--
in high schools and middle schools as well
as other college teachers saying I don't use peer review
because the students can't do it.
Well, they can't do it because they haven't been shown how
to do it.
They don't-- they don't know what it means.
And so, you have to model for them, what is it--
what does it look like to talk about writing in progress
without evaluating it, without editing it?
So, one of the things that I do is I do a whole class workshop
very early in the semester in which I conduct the workshop
and help them see what does it look like to talk
about a student's writing in progress.
It seems to me that if you first of all help students understand
that distinction, and secondly, model it for them,
and then thirdly give them the opportunity to practice it,
they'll-- they'll be-- they'll use those peer response
activities in ways that will make them better
writers eventually.
Their text might not show it in the beginning,
but they'll internalize some of that,
because they will now the experience over time
of responding to a text without having to worry
about whether it's correct or incorrect.
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