Peer Review and Feedback

It is obvious from this week's readings that there are many ways to go about generating, giving, and receiving feedback for developing writers in our class. It is also clear that giving valuable feedback—both as teachers and students—is something that takes intention and practice.

Fulwiler (who totally looks like Hemingway) attempts to show us the product of several different drafting stages, although I felt that at times he could make parts of the process a bit more explicit in order to be useful. While it is nice to see the process in action, this doesn't really tell me much about how I would implement revisions in my own classroom, especially when you consider how different 8th graders' literacy practices are from those of college students. I think his instruction for revision takes a lot for granted - that students know what good writing looks and sounds like. Some of his suggestions (I appreciate that they are not commandments) help, but others (Let Form Follow Content) are way too vague for students who have had limited exposure to different genres.

I found this site to be helpful because it includes different concrete strategies for teaching peer review as part of writing across content, which is great for Common Core!

I also like the idea of experimental drafts and playing with genre and constraints. In some ways this takes the pressure off the drafting process because nothing is really a “final” product. Being afraid of writing most often stems from thinking that the first draft has to be perfect. What do we do as teachers to both challenge students to produce quality work and get them over the first hurdle of writing?

The next hurdle seems to be giving and receiving useful feedback from peers, which Winn and Johnson, as well as VanDeWeghe, find to be one of the most culturally relevant practices.

In particular, I appreciate VanDeWeghe's use of the word disposition, namely, finding ways to encourage young writers “to develop the skills and dispositions to interact wisely with other writers” (p. 96). I think we often think of skills, even writing and critical thinking skills, as things that can be acquired quickly, within a few repetitions. Disposition seems to imply that this is something that takes time and repeated effort to cultivate. It might take more than one or two mini-lessons, in fact it might take an entire year or years of school to get students to a place where they can provide helpful feedback by habit. Dispositions take into account all of the developmental aspects of our students:

Responding well calls for not only identifiable skills but also intra- and interpersonal skills, along with such crucial emotional and cognitive dispositions as empathy and reader-based anticipation. (VanDeWeghe, p. 96)

While there are many ways to teach it—either as a class like Ackley, or as a set of mini-lessons—I think it is important to model peer-reviewing. This was a cute and rather helpful video (see clip below) I found featuring students talking about some of the pitfalls of peer reviewing.

A final word on VanDeWeghe: he makes a salient point that “many ingrained curricular values and mandates work against higher-level response and the time it takes to teach (and learn) it well” (p. 99). We will have to untrain our students to give evaluative or affective responses just like we will have to untrain them to seek “teacher answers.” Which may take a good deal of time.

As far as Ackley's method of peer tutoring, I am intrigued by the idea of making a high school or middle school writing tutor center. I know that I learned the most about literature when I was peer-facilitating study sessions. Having to teach a concept to someone else often helps you understand it better yourself, so I see Ackley's tutoring model working not just for “advanced” writers, but writers at all levels, seeing themselves as having something to offer their peers in terms of writing advice. It is also a great way to leverage and create student leaders.

Given some of the pushback against “writing as process” models (which give White kids the space to use literacy skills they already know from home, while expecting students of color to know it without having been taught, thus putting one group ahead of another) it seems as though there isn't much discussion in Ackley about the role of language and power in peer-reviewing activities. I did find an interesting article on race, gender and status in peer reviewing interactions. 

Since VanDeWeghe basically references Simmons for the entire article, I was curious to read it for myself, and I have linked it here if you are interested.
http://users.ipfw.edu/wellerw/Responders_training.pdf