Virtual Peer Review: Using Blackboard to Create the Writing Workshop
Environment
Shelley Aley and Pavel Zemliansky
James Madison University
Introduction: The Role of Peer Review in the Writing Classroom
Before we begin discussing the use of Blackboard for student peer review
sessions, it important to consider the role of peer review in writing theory and
pedagogy and conditions under which effective peer review sessions can be
organized and conducted. Instructional technology should be driven by theory
and pedagogy in the field, and understanding this connection should help both
developers and users of such instructional technology to be more efficient and
creative in their work. We will get to the specifics of using Bb for peer review a
little later. For now, though, we would like to set up the theoretical and
pedagogical foundations for the use of Bb for peer review sessions.
Contemporary theories and pedagogies of composition consider peer review of
student papers extremely important. In most writing and writing intensive classes,
students are expected to participate in peer revision and editing workshops,
during which they critique their colleagues’ papers at various stages of the writing
process and have their papers critiqued by other in turn. Peer review sessions
are practiced at every stage of the writing process: from invention and critiquing
of a first, very rough draft of a paper, to a full-blown workshop of a complete
draft, to working with the style and mechanics of a paper as the process of
writing it nears completion.
We’re finding that peer review can effectively be conducted in courses across the
disciplines, and not just in English and writing courses. Peer review can be used
to examine and critique paper proposals, to encourage writing in preparation for
later writing assignments, and for student-on-student response to assigned
papers. Peer review can play an important role in engaging students in the
discipline’s discourse. Through a series of low-stakes writing assignments
(informal writing assignments that are not weighted as much as later, high-stakes
assignments), students can take risks and respond to each other using terms
and conventions they will need to master in order to become effective writers in
the course. After all, sometimes the discourse of a discipline can seem like a
foreign language. Students need ways to practice interacting in a new discourse
community before being required to write formal papers. Bb can be the virtual
place where students can engage in low-stakes discourse experiences, and in
the process of learning how to speak and write in a particular discipline, the
students can develop the sense of community essential in a good class.
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We use the term “peer review” and not “peer editing” for an important reason.
Scholars in writing pedagogy point out that when students talk about revising a
paper, they seldom use the term “revision.” Many refer to the activity we’d like to
see them engage in as “fixing” a paper. In other words, they think of the activity
as merely editing surface features, and not re-envisioning or re-seeing their work.
When they use a writing center, students often tend to refer to the work they do
there as getting their paper “corrected.” Getting something “fixed” or “corrected”
implies that competent authorship lies outside of the student’s realm. Quite to
the contrary, the author should become the authority. In writing instruction, we
seek to center authorship in the writer, to help the writer become the authority.
The purpose of peer review is to gradually internalize the writer’s authority over
his or her own text. The author, however, needs to learn how to become that
authority. Peer review, when conducted effectively, helps accomplish this goal.
It is difficult to engage students in the idea and process of revision. Students
tend to adopt the mind set of passive receiver. They want to know what we want,
what it will take to get a good grade. Peer review is active, not passive. What
we call this activity is important in developing the students’ understanding of the
role they play and the kind of work they are being asked to do. In the process of
“peer review,” the peer acts as the second seer, the one who plays the role of the
author’s internal critic. Part of the reader’s job is to re-see the paper for the
writer, who has seen the paper so much in the process of writing it that he or she
can no longer see it. Early peer review sessions concentrate on the paper itself,
not on surface details, which in revision may change markedly. As Pavel pointed
out, editing for style, grammar, and mechanics will come later.
In a typical peer review session a class is split into small workshop groups
(usually 3 or 4 students per group). The students are instructed to provide copies
of their papers to every member of the group and, then, usually given instructions
as to what issues or questions to attend to during the workshop. In a face-to-face
writing class, every member of the group then proceeds to read his or her paper
out loud with the other members following on their copies. Students are then
required to provide both written and oral feedback to the draft in order to help the
author revise or edit.
While the most effective way to conduct peer review may be having students
read their papers aloud to group members (who either follow along with a hard
copy of the paper or not), peer review can also be conducted through silent
reading, although this approach has its downfalls that we need to be aware of.
Conducting peer review in the Bb environment will require students to read each
others’ papers and review them. Care must be taken to prevent the student
readers from merely editing the work. Student readers will tend to get hung up
on surface faults such as spelling, grammar, and mechanics, and ignore the
overall paper in their comments. It is also important to prevent the students from
explaining their papers to their group members before reviewing them. Although
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this tends to be more of a problem in face-to-face peer review than it is in the
virtual environment, I remind my students that when their work goes out to their
readers, the author won’t go with the paper. The paper must be able to stand on
its own. Too much explanation (spoken or in an email) will affect the way the
way the reader sees and understands the paper. If an author wants a good
reading from his or her peers, for all intents and purposes, the author should
remain silent and let the paper speak for itself.
There are several reasons, both pedagogical and logistical, for such a prominent
role of peer review in writing classes. First of all, students are encouraged to
write not only for the teacher but for a larger audience. Their classmates provide
such an audience. Secondly, the process model of composing on which most
writing courses are based encourages students to see themselves as writers,
albeit novice writers, and to learn not only to hear feedback from the teachers,
but also from their colleagues. Moreover, students are encouraged and taught
how to provide such feedback to other members of the writing class as needed.
The practice of peer review helps students to internalize the voice of the reader,
so that he or she can better understand and meet the reader’s needs. Students
demonstrating a lack of audience awareness learn from their readers, for
example, that providing background information may be crucial for understanding
the relevance of an issue, that defining key terms may be essential in
communicating with the reader, and that providing sufficient illustration and
example may be necessary in moving a reader toward agreement. After a few
peer review sessions, I hear my students say in conferences what they now
realize they must do for their readers in order to satisfy and engage them. This is
in marked contrast to the novice writer, who seldom considers audience when
writing an academic paper.
Finally, if properly prepared and orchestrated, peer review workshops can greatly
help the often-overworked and over-extended teacher in running the class. Welltrained and experienced student readers can be just about as useful in providing
content and mechanics advice to their peers as the teacher. According to
contemporary composition pedagogy, in order to improve, writers do not need to
be constantly corrected by the teacher. Instead, at most stages of the writing
process, it is preferable that students receive feedback from their peers in a nonthreatening, “low stakes” environment, that they see themselves as members of
a community of writers rather than as novices who will always be corrected and
evaluated by the teacher. In a word, then, peer review sessions help students to
improve as writers, readers, and editors. They increase their confidence as
writers and help create the atmosphere of genuine collaboration in the writing
classroom.
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Conditions for Effective Peer Review Sessions
There are several conditions essential for effective peer review in the writing
classroom. These conditions can be separated into long-term and short-term and
are relevant for peer review workshops conducted both using Bb and in other
instructional environments, either face to face or online. The long-term conditions
are built by the members of the class community over time, and may take weeks
or even months to develop. Creating the short-term conditions is primarily the
teacher’s responsibility, and they can be created fairly quickly through sound
class management and attention to detail. The way in which the teachers creates
those short-term conditions affects the creation of long-term ones because,
obviously, students take cues from their instructor and often model their own
behavior in the classroom on what they see their teacher do.
Long-Term Conditions
1. Trust among the members of a review group. In other words, each
members of a review team must understand that other group members
are there not to evaluate him or her but to help with revision or editing.
By viewing student peer-reviews, the instructor can note examples of good
responses and share them in class. Using positive examples will reinforce
the role of the peer reviewer as responsive reader, not critic.
2. Willingness of each group member not only to fulfill the minimum tasks set
forth by the teacher, but also to go beyond that minimum in their written
and oral response to each other’s drafts.
Again, by praising the job well done, instructors can reinforce the kind of
work they want the peer review to accomplish. Instructors can assign
points for peer review to encourage participation, but using positive
examples to illustrate what a good peer review looks like is most effective
for teaching the class how to respond.
3. Understanding of writing as revision and re-writing, not “fixing” of errors.
One of the most difficult tasks an instructor has is getting students beyond
the “fixit” mentality when it comes to peer review. At JMU, we have an
online journal of first-year composition papers. The editors usually include
a paper and its drafts to illustrate how revision can improve a paper.
Along with the paper and its drafts, the editors usually include a piece of
writing by the student author where he or she discusses the revision
process. If an instructor doesn’t have a resource such as the one I just
described, he or she could save a successful student paper and its drafts
to share with future students. An instructor could also invite a student to
come to class the following semester and talk about how peer review and
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revision led to a better paper. We encourage instructors to find ways to
engage students in a writing process, and go beyond the end-product
mentality that can many times lead to terrible writing.
Short-Term Conditions
1. Clarity of goals and instructions from the teacher to the students. The
teacher must not only explain the goals of each workshop to the students,
but also convince them of the importance of working on specific aspects of
the draft during a particular peer review session.
I like to involve my students in activities that will lead to the development
of the goals. For example, I always give written assignments—something
necessary in the online environment. I engage the students in generating
a description of an excellent paper. What would that paper do? What
would it look like? In describing the excellent paper, the students develop
the mindset to write an excellent paper and later to read their group
member’s papers and comment on them. I also like to model peer
response by responding to a paper the students write early in the
semester. As Pavel pointed out, students often model their behavior on
what they see their instructors do.
2. Balance between giving instructions and trusting review group members to
come up with ways of sustaining the workshop session. If a peer review
group is “locked in” too much by the teacher’s directions, its members,
especially if they are inexperienced writers may believe that following the
rules is the only thing that matters.
When I stepped in for another instructor a couple of years ago when she
had to be out of town, I witnessed what can happen when students
become too “locked in.” Before leaving, my colleague dutifully created a
detailed peer review guide for her students to follow. The students took
about five minutes per paper to answer the questions. Many of the
answers were merely one-word replies, like “yes” or “no.” I could see little
use in the activity, which the students completed in about 15 or 20
minutes, depending on the size of each group. The exercise did not
engage the students, because authority, again, lay in the hands of
someone outside of themselves. Unengaged and under peer pressure to
complete the task quickly, they were all able to leave class early.
3. Giving each member of a review group an equal chance to share his or
her writing and to comment on other writers’ work. In Bb-based
environments, this means making sure that all review group members
have access to the technology and know how to operate it.
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While students signing up for an online course should have technology
sufficient to open Bb, not all students will have the same word processing
software, and even different versions of the same software can cause
unequal conditions, especially during peer review. For example, while
Microsoft Word enables readers to insert comments into a paper, those
comments may be viewed differently and more or less effectively,
depending on the version of Word the student has. We believe the
authors of Bb should develop an effective component in Bb that will
enable peer review without the use of word processing software (more on
this later).
Using Bb to Organize and Conduct Effective Peer Review Sessions
In this section, we would like to share some of the approaches and techniques
we have used to organize and conduct peer review sessions in Bb. Users of Bb
will know that peer review sessions can be set up and carried out either using the
Group function or via the Discussion Board function. Each function has its
advantages and disadvantages, and teachers should choose them depending on
their teaching philosophies and goals in the classroom.
Using the Group function of Bb to conduct peer review sessions allows for a tight
class and small group management. It allows students within each group to have
a “private” review space that cannot be used or seen by others in the classroom.
Students can also use their small group’s discussion forum and chat room, if
enabled by the teacher. Obviously, these features are beneficial if teachers want
each workshop group to have more privacy online.
On the other hand, using the discussion forum of Bb allows the class to create a
public space where everyone sees everyone else’s work. The teacher may
enable the attachment function that would allow students to upload files with their
papers. In that case, everyone enrolled in the class can leave comments to every
paper in the discussion forum, thus creating a truly public space online and
allowing all the students in the class to learn from each other rather than limiting
the interaction to each small group.
Some Practical Advice
In Bb, I like to use the group areas to set up the peer review sessions. I’ve
experimented in the past with groups of three or four students. However, when
teaching online, I’ve discovered that participation in peer review can slack off
during the semester, compared to participation in face-to-face classes. To
prevent one member of a small group from ruining the peer-review experience for
the rest of the group, through a lack of participation, I’ve begun to make my
groups larger—five or six members, instead of three or four. I limit the number of
reviews each session to three, although I encourage students to read all group
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members’ papers, to get a good sense of how other writers are responding to the
assignment.
1. I set up peer review using the small-group Discussion Board area, which I
can enable for each group. I set up each peer review session clearly in
separate Discussion Boards in each group. Sessions are appropriately
scheduled on my course outline and clearly visible in Bb. Written
instructions are supplied in Course Documents for each peer review
session. Students know when and where to conduct peer review,
because I reinforce the assignment by posting permanent announcements
to the announcement page as the date for each peer review approaches.
2. In the class Discussion Board—the one that all member of the class can
access together—I leave permanent instructions for students to go to their
small-group’s Discussion Board area to conduct peer review. I reserve
the class-wide Discussion Board for large-group discussions.
3. In each peer review session, I have each group member create a thread
to which he or she attaches his or her paper.
4. During peer review, group members go into their group Discussion Board
area, open a thread, and retrieve a paper. They are instructed to read
three papers that have not already been reviewed three times. In the
Discussion Board environment, it is easy to see which papers have
already been reviewed three times. My students experience confusion
and frustration during peer review when I’ve used the file-exchange area
to download papers and responses for peer review. To avoid this reaction
from my students, I like using the small-group Discussion Boards, ones
created for each peer-review session. They help the students stay
organized, because the work is neatly arranged there for ease of viewing.
5. Students can comment on a paper, save it as a new file, and then attach it
to a reply thread. Reply threads responding to each author’s main thread
organize the responses using an outline format for easy viewing. It is
clear which responses go with which paper, because Bb indents replies to
a thread and places them directly beneath it.
6. After reading a paper, a student can also make his or her responses in the
reply thread itself. I like how this approach keeps students from writing
directly on a peer’s paper. It keeps them from merely editing a paper and
focuses them, instead, on responding to it.
7. I generally give students 48 hours to conduct peer review. They have one
deadline for posting their papers and another deadline for posting reviews.
I have found that the following steps must be taken in order to ensure a smooth
and useful peer review session in Bb. I typically use the Groups function of Bb to
conduct peer reviews sessions.
1. Before even splitting the class into small workshop groups, spend time
with students discussing the fundamentals of peer responding. For this
purpose, I use Richard Straub’s excellent article “Responding, Really
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2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
responding to Other Students’ Writing,” which provides novice writers with
a set of accessible steps towards becoming a better responder. Please
note that this applies both to face-to-face and online writing classes.
After the students have had a chance to read the article and discuss the
fundamentals of effective peer review, both orally and in writing, on Bb’s
discussion forum or through other means, it is time to assign them to peer
review groups. If you choose to use the Group function on Bb, now is also
the time to create those groups. I typically enable all the functions in the
small groups, except for the chat room. I have found that students prefer
asynchronous communication with each other to synchronous.
I then make sure that each student knows which group he or she has
been assigned. In face-to-face classes where I use the Group function for
peer review, I typically conduct the first review session in class. During
that session, students get a chance to get comfortable working with each
other. In an online class, before assigning a full-scale review session, I
invite the students to do a few ice-breaking activities on the group’s
discussion board, such as an introduction, telling their histories as readers
and writers, and so on.
I then post detailed instructions for the review session on the web site,
typically in the Announcements section, and go through the instructions
with the whole class, taking questions and addressing any concerns that
students may have. I believe that it is important to keep the instructions on
the “common” space of Bb rather than posting them separately to each
review group’s space because that gives students a continuing sense of
community in the class. An example of such instructions from a class that I
am currently teaching can be seen on this slide. This is a face-to-face first
year writing class, in which I use the group function of Bb for online peer
review.
The students then upload their files to the group space and the workshop
begins. I usually allow 36-48 hours for a group of 4 students to finish their
work. This means downloading all other group members’ files, reading
them, and leaving specific written comments on the margins, typically
using MSWord’s comment function. After that, the students upload their
papers back to the group site.
A note on the use of the group discussion forums. I find them to be useful
spaces where students can discuss their work and simply chat, but they
function well only if the teacher takes time to create favorable conditions
for such exchanges. Simply telling students to post things on the
discussion board will usually not be enough. On the other hand, giving
students too many instructions may create the impression that the teacher
is taking the group space over. Therefore, I prefer to invite students to
participate in the discussion forums, but usually do not insist that they use
them all the time. After all, my main purpose is to get them to comment on
each other’s papers, and group discussion forums are nice add-ons.
After the review work is complete, it is useful to ask each student in the
review group to post an executive summary of his or her responses to
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others, whether on the small group discussion board or on the class
discussion board. This not only provides the teachers with the means to
monitor the activity of various students, but also to help students vocalize
and conceptualize their work as responders to other writers.
A Word on the Role of the Teacher During and After the Workshop
As I mentioned earlier, it is important to set clear instructions and to let students
know that you will be watching what goes on in their review group. At the same
time, it is crucial not to take over the review space and the review process.
Student writers, especially, novice writers, need to know at all times that they
have a low-threat, low-stakes writing space to revise and to experiment. At the
same time, they need to know that help is always available when they require it.
Process-based composition pedagogy sees the creation of each written work as
a process of re-writing, re-thinking, and re-imagining, where only the last draft in
a series of drafts should be formally evaluated and graded. I have found that the
small group discussion forum provides me as a teacher with an excellent space
to raise concerns or ask questions of the students if I need to, without overtaking
their workshop and review space.
Limitations of the Current Bb Platform
Despite the impressive peer review capabilities of the current versions of Bb,
there are some significant limitations that we would like addressed in the future
releases of the platform.
1. Bb remains a very teacher-centered platform. The teacher has to initiate
every function, set every permission, and decide what students can do in
their review space. I’d like to see students be able to take more initiative
by setting up their own discussion forums or chat rooms, for example. This
would work well with the stated and implied goal of most writing classes,
which is the development of student independence and initiative as
readers, writers, and responders.
The kind of freedom students can experience using Bb, when given more
responsibility for setting up their own discussion forums or chat rooms, will
lead to a greater sense of authority and, thus, authorship. It will also lead
to a more community-based environment, where students can feel freer to
share ideas and collaborate with each other on projects. These activities
can lead to the creation of a community-based learning experience, the
kind of experience we strive to create in the writing classroom.
2. We’d like to give students the ability to respond to each other’s papers
without having to upload and download them as Word files in the Group
space. Such a function exists in the competing packages such as
MyComplab (Longman) and WriteSpace (Bedford St. Martin’s). Having
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this capability would also allow students to see the “aggregated”
comments of all their colleagues in one place rather than having to
download three or four separate files and collating the comments or
having to remember them.
While students can use the “versions” feature in Word to create the
“aggregated” comments that Pavel mentions, not all students have Word,
and even when they do have Word, not all will have the same version.
Furthermore, creating instructions for how to use Word to do this kind of
activity is time consuming and taxing. We’d like to see Bb create an even
better environment for peer review in the future, one that does not rely on
the use of word-processing software for these kinds of activities.
3. When uploading large files, students have no way of knowing how much
space they have left in their personal quota. For example, this spring,
during a project that combined images and words, several class members
ran out of server space and had to send me, their teacher an “emergency”
e-mail asking to clear their group pages of old files.
Perhaps a feature could be created in Tools to enable students to check
their server space.
4. I’d like to see easier access to review spaces without having to go through
so many “clicks” to get to where you need to go. Research shows that
user interface design influences the kinds of work that users are able to on
a website and the level of enthusiasm with which they do that work. Bb’s
creators would do well in this respect by taking a page from such open
source software packages as Drupal.
As Pavel points out, too many clicks can influence a user’s enthusiasm for
using an interface. Teachers have plenty to do without having to write
extensive instructions outlining all of those clicks. I know I could find
better ways to spend my time than writing the extensive instructions for
conducting peer review that I have to prepare now. The practices of peer
review and peer response are gaining wide interest across the curriculum.
To meet the needs of more and more instructors from across the
disciplines, Bb would be wise consulting with writing specialists in the area
of peer review to create a virtual space for these activities, one that is
easy to access, flexible in use, and user friendly—to cut down on the
number of clicks.
Final Thoughts on Conducting Successful Peer Review
When organizing and facilitating online peer review sessions using Bb, writing
teachers should use the same fundamental principles of peer response that they
use in other, offline classroom situations. These principles include
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1. Discussing, at length, with students the goals, objectives, and methods of
peer response;
2. Giving detailed and precise instructions to students without overtaking
their review spaces and review processes;
3. Being “present” during the workshop, giving the students confidence that
the teacher is there to help.
4. At the end of the peer review session, raising any outstanding concerns
and questions with the students, praising them for their successes and
outlining directions for improvement.
5. Holding students and themselves to standards, policies, and procedures
announced before the workshop.
Conclusion: Achieving Overall Goals with Peer Review in Bb
By organizing and facilitating online peer review in courses across the
disciplines, instructors will be amazed at the improvements they will see in their
students’ writing. Students, who become acclimated to the discourse of a
particular discipline, will feel much more comfortable engaging in activities that
require reading, writing, and discussion in the classroom. Peer review directly
and critically engages students in the use of a discipline’s discourse. Instead of
receiving the awkward, unreadable prose insecure students produce at the end
of the semester, instructors will find papers that actually make them want to read
on.
I often hear teachers in other disciplines say that they don’t teach writing—they
aren’t the experts. They say they don’t “count off” for the English mistakes, but
only the mistakes in the content of the paper, instead. This kind of comment is
confusing, because I don’t see how we can separate the way a paper is written
from its content. To be a member of a discourse community, students need to
understand and master to a large extent the way people in a field engage with
each other, both through their language and language use.
Anyone who assigns writing—and I hope everyone does—is a writing instructor.
We each teach the discourse of our disciplines, not just their contents. We
cannot escape doing so. What we can do to make the task more effective and
enjoyable is to invite our students into the discourse community and help them
practice using its language, first in the low-stakes writing and speaking
assignments that involve peer review, among other things, and later in the more
demanding assignments that carry higher-stakes, at the conclusion of the
semester. Waiting until the end of the semester to assign writing activities is too
late. We invite you to employ writing and peer review activities early in the
semester to help your students achieve the comfort level necessary for using the
discourse of your discipline to improve both their writing and their learning.