From the Director
Undergraduate students can help faculty members teach writing by helping each other.
Many will believe I’m deluded when I assert that.
To many faculty members, peer response (also known as peer review, peer editing, or collaborative learning) is—as I’ve often heard claimed—simply a case of “the blind leading the blind.” It’s my experience, though, that Texas A&M students can offer highly useful advice to one another about writing. Here’s why I advocate peer responses:
Peer responses slow writers down, giving them time to re-see (revise). In writing, time often translates into improvement. Time spent with other students in conversation over a text—especially when guided by a rubric or a set of leading questions—usually will produce better writing. Peers reading a text aloud together, puzzling over its meaning and form, will find more of its gaps and errors than will a lone writer reading silently, filling in those lapses through familiarity with what he meant.
Peer responses allow students to form judgments about what makes effective writing. To do a productive peer response, students must internalize some of the criteria for effective writing. Then they must judge their peers’ work against those criteria. Assessing a text in this manner is a necessary skill for good writing. Eventually, students will judge their own efforts against the standards they’ve learned.
Peer responses encourage students to learn from one another. Students working together to improve a paper bring to the task their various talents. The student with strong writing skills shares those abilities, usually in a more comprehensible form than an instructor would. Moreover, because writing is a complex task, students get to share their own expertise: One student might be strong in organization, another in argument, and a third in the rules of grammar. Together, they develop a better paper while teaching each other.
Peer responses provide a fresh way for students to learn course content. While students are reviewing each other’s texts, they’re also reinforcing their knowledge of course material. For instance, a peer responder considers whether her classmate has fully understood a theory being presented. Another student analyzes a peer’s lab report to see if conclusions drawn from an experiment are correct. Students can’t address the writing without also considering the subject matter.
Peer responses promote engaged and active learning. Instructor comments written on a completed paper typically have little impact; it’s too late then for students to apply the knowledge. An instructor may describe a passage as wordy or awkward, but unless a student is allowed to revise, she won’t learn how to make that passage concise or graceful. When she gets that sort of reaction from a peer on an early draft, though, it encourages re-engagement with the text.
While instructors seldom have time to comment on all drafts of all papers, we do have time for peer responses, either in class or as homework. Ideally, students will get some response from peers and some from instructors, all of it in time to be used in revision.
I hope you will experiment with peer responses. I believe the process can help your students improve their writing.
The UWC Web site provides information about peer responses. The UWC offers a peer response workshop in our newly expanded classroom workshop program.
— Dr. Valerie M. Balester
Executive Director
University Writing Center
v-balester@tamu.edu
