On day two of the genre unit we had student working with the rough draft of their change papers that they wrote the previous day. They worked with their peers to help them edit and revise their papers. They began by reading their papers aloud to each other. They worked with a set of “guiding questions” to help keep them aware and focused on the important issues. I know that by working with their peers they will learn about the writing process and be more cognoscente of the issues in their own writing after peer editing. Most of the students did very well with this lesson. At the end of the peer editing time I asked them the following questions about what they thought of the process:
-How was peer editing helpful?
-What did you learn from your partner’s suggestions and
this process?
-Would you like to engage in peer editing in the future?
-Are there any changes that you think would make this process helpful?
Most of the responses were very positive. I did, however, have a few students that struggled with the partner aspect of peer editing. These are the same students that normally struggle when working with their peers so I expected this but encouraged them to try to work and help each other.
Something I learned about my students that was not necessarily an objective was how much they enjoy reading their writing aloud. I think this was beneficial in improving their oral skills but also it allowed them to have some ownership over their own writing. Even though they were working to correct each others writing and getting constructive feedback they seemed to be genuinely proud of what they had written. Many of our students really need this boost in confidence along with an improvement in verbalizing their ideas and reading with enthusiasm.
I will re-teach the peer editing process in the upcoming genre unit when we have the students going through the writing process again. We will review how to give constructive feedback, highlight the writers strengths, and give them suggestions on organization, voice, grammar, etc.
If we were to re-teach this lesson we would require the students to write comments and suggestions for their partner and give that piece of paper to their partner to help them partner edit. We did not do this because we wanted them to have a conversation with each other about their papers rather than just writing on each other’s paper, but then we think that some students went to make their changes and forgot some of the things they had talked about with their partner. We think a good way to solve this would be to tell them to discuss their work first and to go through both papers and the comments for each paper and then to take a minute to write a few of the most important comments for each other. We would also ask them to write a question that they have for their partner that they would like to be clarified in their final draft. When we asked the students what they would change if we were to do peer editing again, a couple students said they would like to have written comments and we agree with them, but we also do not want to lose the discussion element of peer editing. We think by having the conversation and the written comments the students would be able to edit their rough draft better, which would then lead to stronger final drafts. Having the students write comments for their partners would also help us to assess the students and how the peer editing time helped them.
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