In Praise of Blindness: Making Peer Response Count

I hear this complaint all the time – from instructors and students – that peer response is, in effect, the blind leading the blind.

A common scenario: Students get into small groups to “workshop” their papers. After about five minutes they are examining their cuticles or talking about last night’s episode of South Park. When asked why they aren’t discussing their papers they say “we’re done; the papers look good; we don’t know what else to say.”

Here is what else I know:
1. Peer response is an incredibly powerful teaching tool to help students improve their writing and boost their confidence as writers/readers.
2. When it works (and it does!) students write better revisions than if they only received instructor feedback. In portfolio essays and course evaluations, my students most often cite peer response as the most valuable tool to their improvement as writers.
3. But the instructor has to lay some groundwork first.

How I’ve made it work:
• Workshops don’t work (at least not at first). Students will have much more success (both as reviewers and reviewees) if they write a formal peer response letter or critique.
• Practicing as a large group, giving a mock critique of a "fake" paper primes the pump, gets students’ critical and analytical muscles working, reminds them they know how to be readers, and gives the instructor a chance to model how to reframe vague or overly evaluative comments.
• A few specific prompts of issues to address in the paper (i.e. main idea and introduction) encourage insightful, supported comments; a laundry list of many possible writing issues to address won’t.
• Writing a self-evaluation/revision plan is important if students are to apply feedback (mine or other students’) to their drafts and make real revisions.


I find it useful to first do a mock workshop in class using a “fake “paper. This can be accomplished in a half hour or less. They are much more likely to be brutally honest when they don't know the writer. At that time you can reframe their comments in constructive ways while praising them for being critical, and remind them that honest, respectful criticism is much more helpful for the writer than vacant praise. I also facilitate this workshop by making them point to specifics rather than making general comments like "it flows, I liked it."

With the peer letter, I make it a formal assignment: typed, double-spaced, proofread, and with an assigned point value. You might even tell them ahead of time what you'll be looking for (like a grading rubric). What’s worked best for my classes is for each student to take home and critique two peers’ papers.

Lastly, I think it’s important to have writers write a short self-evaluation and evaluation of their peers’ critiques – what advice or insights did they find helpful? how will they use this feedback (or their own insights) when revising the piece? In this way the feedback loop comes full circle as writers consider and incorporate criticism and plan their revision.

This is one way I’ve used peer response successfully. I think it teaches my students to be better critics of their own work. It also frees me up from feeling responsible for giving a lot of comments on early drafts. Both of these aspects fit my pedagogical goal of treating writing as a process rather than as a flawed product that I, the instructor/expert, give advice on how to “fix.

Please share your own best practices related to using peer response. Post them on the blog or email me with other ideas, questions, clarifications, or for materials.

And have your students read this week’s informative and entertaining Writing Center blog entry at www.psuwritingcenter.blogspot.com on how to make peer response work for them as a writer and a reader.

I Heart Critical Thinking: The Portfolio Essay

I believe in the final portfolio. Despite the fact that they take a long time to grade and they tend to accumulate, clogging every shelf and drawer in my office, I think they are a valuable teaching tool that more accurately charts a student's skills and progress than a final paper or test might.

BUT, in order for them to work, it’s important to give students plenty of cues as to how to approach the final reflective essay that accompanies the portfolio. Otherwise, these tend to be full of vague, generalized statements; mere reiterations from the directions in the assignment; or evaluations of how much the student did or didn’t enjoy each assignment, i.e. “I really learned critical thinking from that one assignment. And I really liked doing that other assignment because it helped me to think critically.” Or they end up being a sort of thank you letter written to give strokes to the professor for how great the class was and how much they liked it (or, in a few cases just the opposite, a chance for students to vent about how much they hated the class).

In none of these cases does the essay/reflective letter meet the goal of the final portfolio – to look back at the products of the course in order to notice process and chart progress: to see where challenges, improvement, and breakthroughs occurred.

Like other academic essays, the reflective piece should use specific details and support from the text (now student-created) to support their assertions. It is an opportunity for students to see for themselves what they have learned in the course, and to show the instructor their ability to apply some of the rhetorical moves of analysis, interpretation, and critical evaluation to their own work.

Part of the problem with reflective essays has to do with genre. Perhaps most confusing is the issue of audience. Is this piece for the teacher? The student? Those anonymous reviewers who will be looking at the portfolios? Often, when we ask students to reflect, as opposed to research, analyze or synthesize, they have difficulty figuring out the voice, the point of view, and the formality of the piece. Ostensibly, the piece is to be written in first person, a point of view that lends itself, especially at the freshman level, to unsupported evaluations and opinions (because if I ask you to write in first person, I must be asking you to tell me how you feel and what you think, right?)

What we can do as teachers to help students navigate the genre of portfolio/reflective essay:

• Call the essay something other than reflective. I refer to it as an interpretive or analytical essay to remind students that they have to perform the same rhetorical moves they have been practicing during the term, but this time, they are analyzing their own process and their own texts. If you call it a letter, make clear that it is a formal letter.
• Give students specific format cues and conventions. Tell them this is a formal essay, that they are supporting an argument or thesis (the thesis can be that they learned something). Tell them whom they should consider the audience. Tell them that they must support their assertions with specific references to the text -- their writing or class work. Remind them that it must be organized logically, paragraphs must be well-developed, and it must be carefully copy-edited.
• Show them examples of successful portfolio essays. As a class or in mentor session, have them analyze examples, noticing voice and audience, structure and organization, assertions and supporting details.
• If you have time, build invention and revision into the writing process. Give them an opportunity to brainstorm and share ideas of what pieces they might choose and why in class or mentor session. Have them “workshop” their draft essays and rewrite it for the final portfolio.

Avoiding Plagiarism, some activities

Here are a couple of links to useful internet resources you might use in class or mentor sessions.

http://education.indiana.edu/~tedfrick/plagiarism is an interactive quiz from Indiana. It uses APA as the citation format. It might be good for class to do together to spark discussion about plagiarism, paraphrase, quotes, and citation.

http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/589/01/ features a "worksheet" that looks at plagiarism in general (no specific citation format). This would also work well as an in-class/mentor session activity or as homework that sparks a class discussion. It asks students to identify problems and offer solutions regarding citation in a list of passages.

Please share your favorite internet or print resources for teaching citation, quotation, paraphrasing, and avoiding plagiarism!

Why does it make me so mad when they cheat?

Recently, I met with someone who thought her student had plagiarized a research paper. It was a hunch based on the consistency of voice and sophisticated level of diction in the paper. Unfortunately, the student hadn't turned in many previous assignments and hadn't done a first draft as assigned, so the professor had little to compare this sample to. She wasn't sure how to approach the student, given that she had no "proof." She wondered if she could just give the student a zero for that assignment.

She was also concerned about dealing with the student because of her own, somewhat unexpected, emotional reaction her suspicion had triggered. She felt angry and disappointed. Maybe even a little hurt. I've had similar reactions to my students' drafts -- even when I haven't suspected plagiarism. Many a night, bleary-eyed and surrounded by stacks of first drafts and rubrics, I've taken personally their poorly and seemingly hastily written drafts. I've despaired at my failure as a teacher and/or fumed at their laziness as students.

Usually the voice of reason interjects in these situations (my dear spouse) and reminds me that the issue is neither as black and white as I make it out to be, nor as dire a situation as it feels to me after three hours of grading. And he's right; the drafting process affords (and often delivers) the wonderful possibility of improvement and growth.

And plagiarism is rarely as simple as a student purchasing a paper off the internet or copying directly from a source. To be sure, there are gradations of intent involved in plagiarism, as well.

In the case of my frinq friend, we tried googling some sentences in the paper to see if it was copied directly off a searchable site (it wasn't). We also went to the student's bibliography to see if the sources were real (they were), if they were available at the PSU library (they were), and whether we could recognzize any verbiage from the paper (we could).

We found several things:
1. None of the phrases were verbatim, rather they were from internet sources listed in the bib. They were failed attempts at paraphrase, since they were simply the source's words in rearranged syntax (hence the suspicious level of diction).
2. The student hadn't cited some sources properly in her bibliography so that we could actually track them down, i.e. include database information.
3. The biggest problem was actually that the paper didn't meet the criteria of the assignment. It was a report, not a research paper. There was no thesis, there was no indication of the writer's inquiry or interpretation of the source material.

Here is the plan we came up for this instructor:
1. Ask the student to come in for a meeting and to bring her sources. Ask her how/where she found them. Point out that her current bib doesn't allow the reader to be able to easily track down these sources.
2. Ask the student about in-text citations and paraphrase. Ask her where her own ideas occur. In places that don't sound like a student, ask her, "are these your ideas or someone else's?" If someone else's, whose?
3. Tell the student that this will be considered her first draft and that she must rewrite it for credit for a second draft. Point out how it misses the requirements of the assignment. Talk to her about thesis and inquiry.

Rather than accusing the student, asking her questions helps the instructor understand what actions may be intentional and unintentional. It also gives the instructor an opportunity to fill in gaps when students forget, miss, or misunderstand information from the class.
Asking her to rewrite the paper doesn't let her off the hook; it affords her the opportunity to practice the rhetorical goals of the assignment -- we generally assign papers because we want students to learn how to do a certain writing/researching task, not just so we can give them a score.

I encourage faculty who suspect a student of plagiarizing to contact me. I'm happy to be a second set of eyes and a co-investigator, and sounding board. Also, contact me for ideas to create assignment sequences that make plagiarism difficult or simply not worth the effort.