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last.updated 11.11.12

 

Teaching Peer Review

Purpose

Peer reviews serve many pedagogical functions: supports collaborative learning, provides students with a real audience for their papers, helps students to review their own work before the final revisions, teaches them good composition strategies for workplace writing, as well as others. Yet, instructors sometimes feel that they do not get enough "bang for their buck" when they ask students to review each other's work; in other words, they do not see students' papers improving enough to justify the amount of time spent on this practice. Therefore, in today's class we will examine both reasons for doing peer review and good strategies for teaching it.

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Before Class

  • Read Paton "Approaches to Productive Peer Review" [BB]
  • Mangeldorf & Schlumberger, "ESL Student Response Stances in Peer Review Task" [BB]
  • Read Leverenz, "Peer Response in the Multicultural Composition Classroom" [JAC, 14.1]
  • Bring in draft of Semester Syllabus

FreeWrite

Answer the following questions so that you can contribute to the class discussion. You have the first ten minutes of class.

Some instructors characterize peer review as a waste of class time. Do you think it is? Why? If not, how would you design peer review for your class? If so, how would you handle the final stages of the writing process? Why?

Discussion: To PR or not to PR

The discussion today will address the following questions:

  • What questions or comments do you have about these articles?
  • What would your pedagogical goals be for doing peer review?
  • What practices would you develop to achieve these goals? What are the advantages and disadvantages of talk, worksheets, or letter writing for peer review?
  • How would you teach these practices to your students?

Activity: Designing Writing Assignments

Part 1: Review Strategy

As a class we will develop a strategy for reviewing our peer's semester syllabus based upon the readings and our discussion of the readings.

Part 2: Conducting Review

You will exchange sample syllabus with one (or two) other person. Go back and reread the assignment for the semester syllabus paying close attention to the expectations and criteria. Read through the student's draft paying attention to how your partner has responded to the assignment.

After you read the draft, use the strategy that we have developed in Part 1 to review your peer's work.

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