Peer Review Workshop Ideas

                                                               Blake Sanz

All students turn their drafts in to me via blackboard on a day before class. For that following class day, three to four students are charged with providing an oral presentation in which they discuss their writing process. Theyre guided in this by a set of questions I send them beforehand. The rest of the class is charged with reading the essays of those who are presenting and preparing questions based on their reading that they will then ask during class following their peers presentation. In general, the presentations have run between 6-8 minutes, and the Q&As that follow have run a little longer, making for an average of about 15-17 minutes per student, and therefore about an hours worth of discussion of four student essays. Ive tried a variety of strategies for each presentation day regarding the final 30 minutes of class, usually involving some amount of individual time in which students might apply what they saw being discussed of someone elses essay to their own.

For discussion, a typical question would be something like this: I noticed you organized your essay according to elements of rhetorical analysis: syntax, diction, etc., and that this led to some overlap in your discussion of the essay you chose to analyze. What reason was there for that ordering, and do you plan to keep it? Other questions ended up being more content-based, as in, In the essay you chose to analyze by Sedaris, he seemed really interested in coming off as funny. Why do you think that was important to him? These, I hope, were helpful in that they addressed not only matters of writing process, but of the thought of what either could or should have gone into the writing of their essay. In some cases, when students were reticent to share, Id call on them to ask their questions, and in other cases, Id ask my own questions. In general, however, students tended to dominate the class those days, and I only interjected a couple of times at points when I felt the discussion was getting off-track, or when I wanted the student presenting to more directly answer something that had been asked.

Invariably, the questions were much more telling than the answers. That is, more often than not, students seemed to be able to recognize in others essays what they had not necessarily accounted for in their own writing. Their ability to incorporate this feedback and self-reflection into their revisions remains unclear, but at least I feel that these projects helped create a class ethic that values revision along the lines of a tangible audience that reads and has reactions to their work.

This idea was born out of my concern that traditional peer review would be difficult to integrate into a 10-week quarter. That is, I wanted to come up with a more efficient way of doing it. At Louisiana State University, my prior students and I had nearly always been frustrated with peer review, and yet I sensed that these skills were an important part of what I wanted them to learn. But it always seemed a waste of time to them, and I think that formalizing the process into an oral presentation provides students a sense of ownership that perhaps traditional peer review had not done for my prior students. Because each student only presents once, on only one of their four essays, I worry a bit that this method doesnt provide as full amount of feedback for them, but the way by which they are encouraged to turn discussions of others papers onto their own makes up for that, I hope.

I also find this efficient, since it seems that many students struggled with so many similar issues. The presentations, then, assuaged many of their personal fears about their writing, helping them form a more tangible sense of their own rhetorical community, and to some extent, I think, demystified the process of writing for them, as well as giving them ideas for revision

John Tiedmann

I give my 1122 students 40 minutes to write an essay in response to a question I put up on the screen; after they are done, I put one of their drafts up on the screen, and we workshop it together. My goal is to give them some practice using concepts we discuss, as a kind of dry run for a graded essay they'll start in the next week.  I also think the exercise serves as a kind of workshop in workshopping. During the workshop part, I ask each student to explain to the class what they thought was strongest about the draft and to suggest how, on the basis of that strength, the writer might revise the essay. They are generally good at identifying strengths, but many of their suggestions for revision are, predictably, a bit vague and under-elaborated. So, when a student gives a less than fully developed suggestion, I explain what one would need to do to make a suggestion of its sort truly useful, then ask the student to develop his/her suggestion while we move on to the next student. I come back to these students periodically, to solicit their now more useful suggestions, and I explain to the class why I think these revised suggestions were indeed more useful. I am usually quite happy with the suggestions once they take the time to think them through, and it seems like the quality of suggestions overall improve the further along we get.

Which brings me to my suggested implementable special solution. Next time we workshop in small groups, I'm going to ask each student to write his/her suggestions for the others in coherent paragraph form, and to send those suggestions to me at the end of class. And when next we meet, I'm going to put some of those suggestions up on the screen, and as a class we'll workshop them together. How can you elaborate this suggestion? How can you extend its scope? How can you make it more specific? Etc. I think that the difficulty that students face when trying to elaborate upon their suggestions for revision is akin to the one they face when trying to elaborate their own ideas: a lack of concrete know-how. An exercise like this gives me a chance to provide it.

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