940. Ways to Teach Peer Writing and Response, in Any Course and Any Size Class
April 21, 2009
11 Ways to Teach Peer Writing and Response, in Any Course and Any Size Class
By providing students opportunities to write, and to work with their peers via writing, a teacher in any
discipline gives students an opportunity to become active agents in their learning, makers of meaning
whose words count in a social setting. Much can be accomplished with relatively little effort on the
teacher's part when you get students to give each other feedback on informal yet idea-rich writing.
This teachers know, and even ones who don't teach what are called writing courses assign peer writing
and response to their mathematics, art history, psychology, and political science students. Why?
Writing's role in critical thinking and learning has been well documented, and it has important social and
pedagogical functions as well. Collaborative writing and peer responding helps to create the network of
relationships that makes a class succeed. Informal writing and small group work varies the classroom
experience and transfers more responsibility to students. Even in large lecture courses, in-class writing
and response time fosters ideas, problem-solving, and playfulness and makes a space for everyone to
say something to someone.
From our own practices and from colleagues' across the disciplines, we've assembled a kit of basic
principles and tested exercises that could help teachers consolidate and improve the ways they teach
peer writing and response in any course, with any size class, at any level of student mastery. Some of
these activities can also be adapted for teaching more formal writing projects that undergo draft and
revision.
1. Set aside time for the initial peer activities to happen in class.
Face-to-face human interactions lay the groundwork for similar activities outside of class or online. You
can begin at any point in the course, whether it's the first week or the tenth, because making peer
writing and response part of your course signals to students a belief that learning and meaning-making
are collaborative, and not only individual, tasks. Activities such as ones we suggest raise vital questions
about course content and can infuse new energy and ideas into a flagging group.
2. As a first activity, make sure that every student has been heard to read at least a sentence of her work
out loud to her peers.
Example: A math professor could get his students to write about their thinking process as they approach
a problem. In class, students could then look over their writing, underline a sentence or a few sentences,
depending on class size, that they're willing to read aloud, then do so one after the other. This would be
a way of getting their voices into the air and letting students get over their shyness about being heard
and responded to.
3. Combine brief individual writing exercises with collaborative work.
This takes only a little time, draws on students' course knowledge and analytical powers, and can be
easily varied and used again and again. Example: a professor of ecology might have her students write
each week about concepts in the course readings that are crucial to the course. She could first ask the
students to explain a key concept in writing in their own words; then she could have the students share
their efforts in small groups and come up with a group version of the explanation, making use of the
strengths that they find in the individual pieces.
4. Always structure the tasks for peer response.
Whether in or outside class or online, peer response activities should be focused and manageable.
Before work begins, explain and model useful responses, in class if possible, or in instructions that you
hand out or post online. Use worksheets or online forms to guide responders in giving appropriate
responses. Because peer feedback, like a teacher's, cannot consider every aspect of the written piece,
design a worksheet that focuses the reviewer on only three or four substantial issues. If, for example,
you are concerned with students supporting all their points with data, the feedback should zero in on
assertions, evidence, and relevance, not on punctuation.
5. Choose some pieces that will be read aloud and discussed in class, by the whole group.
Keep track of whose work was discussed publicly, and try to avoid repeaters. Doing at least one piece
this way for each assignment cycle communicates to students that the task of writing is essential to the
course. Earlier in the course, choose strong work that has features you wish others would emulate; as
the semester continues, choose pieces that show solid work but contain a problem that many people
are having. As the group discusses these pieces, individual students will absorb the advice they are
giving to their peers and use it, perhaps even unconsciously, in their own future writing.
6. Emphasize observational feedback.
The evaluative response may not be the most useful response -- a student writer may learn more about
the state and meaning of her writing and thinking from a peer who summarizes the gist; asks questions
about logical gaps or leaps; articulates what about a written text made him think; or shares his
knowledge on the writer's topic. Try this: As a first attempt at getting your students to do this, have
them trade brief pieces of writing (e.g., two-page reading responses) and write a thoughtful letter of
reply to the other. Because informal writing, like a reading response, may be used in a content course
strictly as a conveyor of course-related thinking, it doesn't always need to be considered and evaluated
as a crafted text.
7. During collaborative work, in class and out, periodically touch base with each pair or group.
As teacher supervising peer review exercises in class, your first responsibility is to the success of the
activity, rather than to any one piece of writing. In the classroom, spend a minute or two with each small
group, asking them how the process is going and, if they seem stuck, offering an observation or question
to restart their conversation. In online forums, make your presence known -- "lurk" openly and
affirmatively -- by commenting on a student's contribution. Your attention motivates commitment to
the process, and even a simple statement (e.g., "The two of you are getting to a more complex
understanding of Hobbes's concerns about the state of nature.") affirms and gives shape to students'
informal dialogue.
8. Have a back-up plan for empty-handed students who come to class without any writing to share.
Distribute the empty-handed ones among groups as feedback givers, since they still have responsibility
to their peers and presumably have the capacity to give something useful. Their participation in smallgroup discussion might help them to get their own writing going. Or, if they seem overwhelmed by the
assignment and unable to make useful contributions, meet with them as a group to try to help them
break the logjam. Talk to them about their (missing) work-in-progress; ask what's holding up their
process. Share your experiences with getting stalled projects going; share some moderate sympathy,
too, without absolving such students of their responsibility to do some work.
9. Base a peer feedback exercise for students on a kind of helpful feedback you have gotten from a
professional peer.
Your current scholarship -- whatever mode that takes (writing, reviewing, editing, consulting) -- gives
you insight into effective habits of mind and practices that nurture work in the field. Take a look into
your archives for helpful comments from mentors, colleagues, and editors on your work, or unearth
examples of feedback you've offered to colleagues. If, for example, a peer reviewer helpfully prompted
you to think and write more clearly by asking a set of specific questions, this may serve as a model for a
worksheet for students, getting them to ask discipline-specific questions about each other's writing and
thinking. Not only must students learn to write in discipline-specific ways, over time they can learn to
give and receive feedback the way professionals do in your field, which in turn develops their own
writing.
10. Experiment with and vary the kinds of peer feedback exercises you assign.
Students get good at giving feedback fairly quickly. In fact, they can get too good and start hoeing the
same feedback row over and over, picking out weak claims, for example, or perceiving logic problems.
To counteract this kind of specialization, therefore, design and assign different feedback tasks and help
students develop a repertoire of ways of reading and responding. Here are a handful of examples:
* Favorite Sentence. Ask the writer to look over his own piece and mark his favorite sentence; this
motivates careful re-reading. Ask the student giving a response to do the same; this is a simple way to
bring about encouraging feedback.
* Juicy Verbs. Students trade drafts, circle all the verbs in a section or passage, and suggest more
informative ones. Sharpening verbs sharpens thinking and also helps develop a vocabulary appropriate
to the discipline.
* Curiosity Response. Students read each other's work, marking places that provoke a desire or need for
more information or discussion. In the margin near such moments of curiosity, the reader should say or
ask what she'd like to know more about.
* Quicksand Moment. Have students trade short drafts, read them, and identify the most difficult part,
the one that's confusing, dense, gets them stuck. In a paragraph, the reader should reflect and write on
what causes the difficulty. The most difficult passage in a text may be the paradoxically promising site
where the student's thinking can be seen developing.
* Believing and Doubting Game. Peter Elbow came up with this great activity for responding to writing
that makes claims, takes a position, or promotes an idea or methodology. Find a full description of it
online or in his handbook listed in the following tip.
11. Seek and share resources and exercises on peer writing and review not only among colleagues in
your field but across disciplines as well. Because most disciplines teach thinking through writing of some
kind, helpful techniques for using student writing may come from almost any field. And the texts listed
below -- which offer peer writing and review exercises, a discussion of principles, and sample
worksheets -- will also add substantially to your repertoire.
References
Bean, John C. Engaging Ideas: The Professor's Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active
Learning in the Classroom. Jossey-Bass, 1996.
"Collaborative Learning/Learning With Peers." Materials for Faculty, Dartmouth Writing Program.
December 2007.
Elbow, Peter and Patricia Belanoff. Sharing and Responding, 3e. McGraw-Hill, 2000.
Pei, Lowry. "Uses of Informal Writing." Materials on Teaching Writing, Simmons College Writing Center.
October 2007.