• brainstorm on topics and thesis sentences
• develop content and sharpen arguments
• consider how well the writer accommodates to an audience and communicates a purpose
• revise a text conform to the conventions of Edited American English or to the conventions of a given discourse type
• check a text for organization, coherence, and readability

Planning the Task

You will have to make a number of decisions to set up an effective peer group. You will have to prepare the following:

A manageable task. Will students work on a draft? Help each other brainstorm or edit? Select a task that can be done in the time allotted and that requires specific but open-ended participation. Decide on how to handle unprepared students. For example, if you have assigned that they bring a draft and a student comes with a mass of notes, you can have him or her work alone on the draft while others work together.

A clear description of the task. Students need a specific goal, such as answering open-ended questions or coming up with a written peer response. They won't do well, for the most part, with overly detailed worksheets, especially those that require "yes/no" answers. Worksheets only improve writing if you follow up and explicitly show how answering the questions relates to students' own writing problems. For example, asking students to identify their audience may be somewhat helpful, but only if students can also articulate how they are accommodating their writing (content, style) to that audience. Your aim should be to foster reflection that leads to revision.

Setting Parameters
You will also have to set parameters as follows:

An optimal group size. Depending on the task, most students do best in groups of three to five. If they have 30 minutes to read and critique a long paper, the task has to be devised to allow enough time, and the group should probably be smaller.

A method for assignment to groups. Students can be assigned randomly, assigned according to their abilities, or assigned according to the tasks they are performing. Or, they may be left to form their own groups. Group members may change from class to class or always stay the same. None of these methods is superior for every situation. Suit the assignment to the task, the class personality, your physical setup, and the syllabus.

A common language. At some point, either within groups or as a whole class, establish some basic critical terminology. Do students share your definition of good writing? Do they know what you mean by style? grammar? logic? Even among professional writers and editors, the use of these terms and the standards people apply can vary considerably. It doesn't much matter if you provide the most standard notion--what matters most is that you and your students are on the same page.

Monitoring Group Progress
To monitor progress and make groups accountable, consider the following:

Ask for a group report. If the class is not too large, an oral report of two to three minutes is helpful because the whole class benefits from hearing each group's consensus. Reports can also be written. To maximize group interaction, don't ask each member to fill in a worksheet alone.

Forget grades. It is very difficult to judge the quality of work done in peer response groups. If students know they will get a grade, they may work too slowly to be of much help, or they may be nervous about giving advice. What you should do is encourage frank and honest collaborations.

Express your expectations.  Ask for honest, tactful, and specific feedback. Define these terms and give examples of the sort of feedback you expect. Also make sure students understand that they are responsible for using their own judgment regarding reader responses to their work. Rather than say a paper is good, tell the writer its specific strengths. If it is interesting, quote some interesting passages or ideas. If it is lively, show some lively description. If it is logical, describe its argument.

Addressing students' concerns about their ability to help each other
Students often express doubt about their ability to critique one another's work in a useful way. They may point out that you are the ultimate arbiter (as the grader). Your should point out that peer responses are not meant to be anything more than a way to help them view their work from a different perspective, with the help of someone who may know different things about their topic or about writing. It is their responsibility to develop a critical sense (and responding to their peer's work can help them do so) which allows them to decide what advice to take and what to reject.  

Some ideas for setting up tasks
Students should be accountable for their drafts and for their critiques, so peer responses should not be anonymous. Encourage students to listen attentively to critics and to make up their own minds about the justice of critical remarks. If critics are tactful, honest, and specific, students should be able to take criticism maturely and use it intelligently.

To establish agreement about terms: Ask groups of five to seven students to read five sample paragraphs (the same five for each group). Have them rate the paragraphs on a scale of 1-4, with 4 being the best. Ask them to consider (1) development; (2) coherence; and (3) organization. Ask them to be ready to justify their rating with specifics from the paragraph. (It would help if you review one or two paragraphs before the whole class, using these criteria yourself, or have them read about them.) Make sure each group has appointed a spokesperson and secretary to take notes. Tell them to prepare a two-minute report, and tell them to take 20 minutes to review the paragraphs. At the end of 20 minutes, ask each group to report. If you have a lot of groups, you can at some point simply ask for disagreement.

To review drafts: Form groups of three to four students. Allow about 10 minutes per paper (for a five to eight page paper). Ask each student to read his/her own draft aloud (no exchanging papers for silent reading, which encourages passivity). As the student author reads, the student critics take notes of their impressions. They should try to identify of the paper's (1) strengths; and (2) weaknesses; and note (3) where they are confused or have questions. After the reading, the author must listen only, while the critics read back their notes. The author is not to respond--only to take his/her own notes. This keeps the process going quickly and prevents authors from becoming defensive. Authors should remember that critics can be wrong!

Written reviews: Written reviews in essay form give students another chance to practice critical reading, editing, and writing skills. Ask the critic to write in essay form (1) a descriptive summary of the essay (to show the writer if his or her basic message is getting across); (2) a specific listing of the essay's strengths and weaknesses, with support from the text; and (3) suggestions for improvement, also as specific as possible. Writing a critique requires a critical but professional stance as well as the marshaling of evidence to back up judgments. Written critiques have an added advantage, in that the writer being critiqued can be required to write back, responding to the criticism. Such an exercise pushes the student writer into seriously considering advice and taking responsibility for accepting or rejecting it. The writer cannot simply write "I agreed with all your comments and took all your advice."

For an example of how to introduce and set up a peer response class activity, see Peer Response Instructions and  PeerResponse Worksheets.

Why respond? Responding to writing is a vital activity (after all, we all need readers), but not necessarily an easy one. Response can take several forms: You might respond as a way of starting a discussion with your peer about his or her paper content. You might respond as a way of building a relationship with the writer. You might respond to share your reactions as a reader. You might respond in the role of “expert” to provide specific knowledge and feedback about the writer’s approach. However, whatever your specific purpose, the bigger picture to keep in mind is that your response should enable the writer to learn, whether that learning will show up in subsequent drafts or future papers.

Below are several strategies for both summary response (commentary that sums up your feedback to a writer’s draft) and in-text comments (the feedback that you place throughout the draft):

Summary Response—Make it personal: It might seem simple enough, try to start your overall response to your peer by addressing him or her by name. This “personal” touch has meaning for the writer as it conveys sincerity and acknowledgement of the student as a writer. And who of us doesn’t pay more attending to what we reads when it starts with addressing us by name? 

Summary Response—Start with the positive: No matter how much of a mess your peer’s paper might be, it is important to begin your response with anything he or she did well. If a goal is to have writers learn from your comments, an initial focus on what works allows for a smoother transition to what needs work. Leading with what writers did well, whether it be a strong sense of purpose, a vivid detail, or a focused controlling sentence, allows messages of concern to be more readily accepted and translated into improvement. 

Summary & In-Text Response—Stop at Three: You don’t have to ask very many writers (and perhaps you were one of them as we were) to find someone who’s had the experience of getting back a draft that was “bleeding” in red ink. Some instructor’s imperative to be comprehensive in their response often can end up overwhelming and intimidating writers. Three is a useful number to keep in mind: Focus on three areas of concern in the writer’s paper or three specific suggestions for revision. More than that won’t necessarily be productive. 

Summary Response—Think Big to Little: When offering summary response, start with higher-order concerns first and then to move to later-order concerns or, in other words, talk about general issues first and then focus on specifics in the text. Keep in mind that you are responding to both sets of issues here, but that you want to foreground this “big” concerns of focus, detail, evidence, and structure, before you get to respond to how the sentences were put together. 

In-Text Response—Respond as a reader: It is awfully easy to read anyone’s writing with a pen or cursor ready to mark, correcting those grammar errors, cutting out those excess words, or offering alternatives. This act of editing can be effective in small doses (for instance, one or two paragraphs) as a way of modeling one way to rewrite the someone’s words, but in large doses it is largely ineffective if you want your peer to learn to improve his or her writing (and it largely leaves student writers dispirited and unmotivated). Instead, respond to the writer’s draft as a reader, and that means primarily asking questions or indicating something that works well or some things that need clarification: “I don’t know what you mean here.” “I expected you to tell me your focus at this point.” “Great detail!” “What do you mean by this?” “What happened next?” “I needed a transition between these two ideas.” 

Additional Resources

Calibrated Peer Review and slide show for students uing CPR (by Dr. Wendi Keeney-Kennicut)
Daedalus Integrated Writing Environment (DIWE™)
"Student Writing Groups: Demonstrating the Process" Videorecording, 34:10 minutes. Available from Evans Library.
Peer-Review Guidelines from M. Maner The Research Process, 2^nd ed. (McGraw Hill, 2001): http://www.mhhe.com/mayfieldpub/maner/resources/peerreview.htm