For the love of peer review

By Katie Wozniak

Peer review in the classroom has its benefits and challenges. On the one hand, peer review can serve as a reciprocal teaching tool, giving students the opportunity to recognize, understand, and improve elements and issues in their own writing and in their peers’ while developing audience awareness and strategies for self-directed learning. On the other hand, peer review can go awry if students only edit for grammar and mechanics, when they do not know enough about a particular writing strategy or rule to provide their peers with a constructive review, or when the instructor does not provide sufficient guidance and support in the process. Additionally, in my experience, students don’t seem to embrace or recognize the potential of peer review; in many cases, I’ve seen students willing to sacrifice all or part of their participation grade to avoid peer review or ignore their peers’ feedback and go straight to mine when revising.

When piloting our first hybrid version of Academic Writing for Adults last quarter, I struggled with these issues, and I also struggled with whether to have students conduct peer review online or face-to-face. Students met face-to-face alternating weeks (except the first two sessions, which were both face-to-face), wrote drafts and received my feedback every week, and were varied in their proficiency with higher- and lower-order writing concerns. So, like with any teaching experience, I had to consider timing, pace, and each student’s prior experience, technological capability, and independent learning skills. I also wanted to consider what the literature said about “what works” in online versus on-ground learning environments. Ellis (2011) conducted a comprehensive study of paper vs. digital peer review in writing courses and found that students who conducted peer review face-to-face on paper tended to look mostly at surface-level issues, while students who conducted peer review online (via an online blog) tended to look at higher-order concerns and provide higher quality comments.

When working through this dilemma, I also reflected on the peer review practice in our current online-only and face-to-face-only offerings of this course. By default in our online-only version of Academic Writing for Adults, we have students conduct peer review in the discussion board by posting their drafts and answering guiding questions about their peers’ papers in paragraph form in discussion threads. When I teach the face-to-face version, I have students switch papers with two of their peers and give them about 30-45 minutes to read and discuss their thoughts using guiding questions. I have not noticed a huge difference in peer review quality, student interest, or students' use of their peers’ comments when revising between online and on-ground courses. Generally speaking, though, it has seemed that students in the online course spend more time carefully reading and writing their comments in response to their peers’ papers than students in the face-to-face course. This is most likely due to the fact that face-to-face peer review can feel somewhat rushed and spontaneous, especially since students are limited to the amount of time available during the course session to both read the essays and come up with a constructive review. They also are limited by pen and paper, often scribbling in the margins in short phrases and abbreviations.

Based on the literature and from my experience with what works and doesn’t work in the online and face-to-face versions of the same course, I structured the hybrid course peer review so that students conducted comprehensive peer review as homework using our online discussion board along with a set of guiding questions to help them focus on specific elements of writing in each other’s drafts. I also asked students to first do a full read-through of their peers’ papers without commenting at all, and then go back and do a second read-through using Microsoft Word’s Insert Comments feature (as I do when I provide feedback on their writing) to point to specific places in their peers’ papers to answer the guided peer review questions. While they worked on their peer reviews, I also provided my feedback on their drafts so they would have all the feedback for a draft by the next time we met in class. Then, when we met as a class face-to-face, we discussed our encounters during peer review. I made sure to stress that the students “owned” their papers and were the final decision-makers when using the feedback from both me and their peers to revise.

When I asked students to debrief me on their experiences at the end of the course, students stated that the peer review was one of their favorite parts of the course. In fact, students often completed their peer review four or five days before the deadline. This has rarely happened in my seven years of teaching. And I don’t think I have ever heard students use the words “love” and “peer review” in the same sentence.

I’ve mulled over this for a month or so, trying to come up with reasons why this particular class had such a strong “love of peer review”. Here’s what I have so far:

First, the process of providing feedback with the Insert Comment tool and using the guiding questions was one that I modeled in my own feedback to students. Perhaps students had more confidence in applying the process independently after being exposed to how I responded to their papers as an audience member using the same questions and tool. In some cases, I began to notice students using phrases and patterns in their peer reviews that I used in my feedback to them (even my favorite punctuation, the em dash), such as “What would you think about X here?” or “I’m not sure I follow this—can you explain more?”. Our feedback to students is sometimes the only writing they see from the “expert”, so perhaps after enough exposure to my feedback, they instinctively (or intentionally) began to use it as a model.

Second, learning how to use the Insert Comment tool is easy. Only one of my students had used it before; the rest picked it up after I did a 60-second demonstration in class (and seemed very amazed that it was right there in front of their faces all these years of writing papers in Word). This tool also makes the feedback process much more efficient, effective, and “friendly” for the purposes of peer review. It not only takes away the time-consuming task of handwriting comments in the margins or between lines, it also supports the in-situ conversational response process we naturally experience in our minds when reading down the page. Additionally, the “comment bubble” is a symbol of thought and communication, not correction (that’s saved for Track Changes). Peer review gone wrong, as when a student crosses out an entire paragraph on her peer’s paper, can lead to feelings of intrusion and defensiveness on the receiver’s part. Something about the thought bubble seems to reduce the chances of this happening when reviewing in a digital environment.

Finally, our class was small (four students, all women), and a strong sense of trust, accountability, and intimacy immediately developed in the first two weeks of the course. I feel these factors are key for peer review--it takes a lot of courage to overcome the feelings of vulnerability that sharing one’s writing entails. I always work hard at establishing a sense of community in the classroom, and this course was no exception. I chose to make the first two sessions face-to-face, and I started the first session with an interview-your-neighbor-and-report-to-the-class activity to which I purposely devoted at least 60 minutes of class time. Additionally, all writing assignments in the course asked students to tie in their personal experience in some way, so peers got to know a lot about each other, find commonalities, and learn new things about themselves and others. However, I can’t say with 100% confidence that these factors are why these students seemed to develop trust and community and loved peer review—it also could have been that the peer review itself brought them together and gave them a peek into each other’s worlds.

There are probably a dozen confounding factors that would make this case impossible to repeat and would contradict my speculations for why peer review was so strong in this pilot. Nevertheless, I do encourage other educators using peer review in their classroom to tinker with modeling, tools, and community-building in their classrooms—and perhaps the love will grow there, too.

References

Ellis, J.M. (2011). Peer feedback on writing: Is on-line actually better than on-paper? Journal of Academic Language & Learning, Vol. 5, No. 1.

Seeking: Excellent Writers

 

Did you receive any impressive student papers this year? If so, please encourage your student(s) to submit their paper(s) to the annual SNL Writing Showcase. Each spring, SNL Writing recognizes excellent submissions at the Spring awards luncheon. To view last year's winning entries and to download this year's application, please direct interested students to: http://www.snl.depaul.edu/writing/WritingShowcase.html.

SNL Welcomes New Writing Instructor, Kamilah Cummings

I am honored to join DePaul and SNL. I cannot believe that had a former colleague not forwarded me an email announcing the position for a writing instructor at SNL, I probably would have never heard of the school. Yet, I cannot think of a better place for me to be at this stage of my career.

I have always been intrigued by the power of communication regardless of the medium, and I believe that writing is one of the most powerful ways to communicate. After graduating from Columbia College with a bachelor’s degree in Arts, Entertainment and Media Management, I began entertainment writing for a variety of publications and clients. I continued to work as an editor and writer for a number of years moving from entertainment writing to investigative writing and everything between. Because of this, I decided to return to school where I received a master’s degree in journalism from Roosevelt University.

While earning my degree, I taught for the Chicago Public Schools, primarily at Morgan Park High School. I fell in love with the possibilities for learning and communicating that teaching offered, but felt constrained by the rigor of CPS teaching. Therefore, after earning my degree from Roosevelt, I began teaching college writing.  I have taught college writing I and II, critical thinking, and developmental writing courses at a variety of schools in non-profit and for-profit settings including East-West University, Saint Xavier University, Morton College, and University of Phoenix Online. Through my experiences at these diverse institutions, I have come to enjoy teaching nontraditional students. I find that these students inspire me and constantly reignite my passion for teaching.

Prior to joining SNL, I was as a full-time English instructor at Westwood College for four and half years. One of the things that most excites me about SNL following my experience at Westwood is the focus on student learning and faculty development. The goals of the school appear to be focused on providing students with a quality, transformational educational experience that will benefit them beyond the classroom. My teaching philosophy is guided by that principle, so I could not be happier to join a group of faculty and administrators who share this belief.

When Dean Alicea quoted bell hooks during my interview and stated that she believed in “an ethic of care” in teaching, I knew that SNL was where I belonged. Having come from what felt like a quantity-over-quality, sweatshop approach to education, it is refreshing to return to the type of educational philosophy that I benefitted from throughout my years of education. 

JustWriting: A Technique for Increased Student Creativity and Decreased Student Anxiety

During the second five weeks of fall quarter, the School for New Learning hosted its 1^st Annual Month of Writing Challenge. The idea grew out of a conversation among SNL’s writing program: Michelle Navarre Cleary, Kathryn Wozniak, Kaitlin Fitzsimons, and I developed the idea during a yearly wrap-up meeting, and as a creative writer pursuing my MFA, I offered to lead the charge. We based much of what we did on the annual National Novel Writing Month held each November (see http://www.nanowrimo.org/). As part of the month, I taught a class called “WriteNow” that focused on a technique that I called “JustWriting.” During at least two hours of each three hour and fifteen minute class period, students just wrote. The atmosphere in this computer room had an energy that pulsed and flexed with the clicking of fingers on keys. When I would stop to look around the room, I saw mothers, grandmothers, women, men, students, and professionals all becoming writers. Their focus was incredible. Periodically I would invite them to get up and stretch, and many found it a challenge to tear themselves away from their work. On their weekly logs, many indicated that this was their most productive writing time of the week. And in these five short weeks and five short classes, by writing together and occasionally sharing experiences and products, these students grew together, grew closer to their goal of 25,000 words each, and moved from novice to experienced writers.

            Why does JustWriting work? Many argue that it doesn’t, and in the beginning of the quarter some of these voices were those of my students. However, in their longitudinal study of student writers at Harvard, Nancy Sommers and Laura Saltz argue that faculty often ask students to “experiment” in the writing that they assign, and I claim one way to become comfortable with experimenting is JustWriting. Sommers and Saltz argue that instructors that often expect college writers to come in as “master builders while they are still apprentices” (132).

            How does the apprentice become the master builder? Experience: “Students who see writing as something more than an assignment, who write about something that matters to them, are best able to sustain an interest in academic writing throughout their undergraduate careers” (Sommers and Saltz 127). They also found that writing experiences in college mean more to weaker (or novice) writers than they do to experienced writers: “Weaker writers often speak with even greater passion about the role of writing in helping them make the transition to college, in giving them the confidence ‘to speak back to the world’” (129).

In another analysis of the revision strategies of novice and expert writers, Sommers found that novice writers think that their first draft is also their final draft. They consider revising as “rewording,” or replacing one word for another, sometimes out of a thesaurus. Experienced writers, by contrast, see a first draft as a “scattered attempt to define their territory” and work on this draft until they have figured out what they want to say. (384). I have worked with many students in courses where they are assigned one, two, three or five page papers, and inevitably a student says that he does not know what he wants to say. Another student, meanwhile, pens an excellent thesis statement in the conclusion of the paper. Though they did not know it, they were using writing to figure out what they wanted to say. By contrast, in WriteNow students were asked to write a minimum of 25,000 words, but were not asked to “say” anything. At the end of our five weeks, almost every student said that he or she ended up somewhere different from where he or she began. In this way, the course forced them to experience some of the techniques used by experienced writers. Because they did not have to create a final draft, students were free to stay in the exploratory, “experimental” stage of writing until they figured out what they wanted to say. Now that they have overcome this hurdle, this fear of writing, the hope is that they might spend more time in a first or rough draft, and see revision as an opportunity to reveal the structure and subarguments of their essays for all of their classes.

One of the reasons that this early drafting process does not happen for novice writers is because writing anxiety is especially prevalent among adult students. This is echoed by many of the students in my class, who said that they chose to accept this challenge because they wanted to become more comfortable with writing. And in fact, Martinez, Kock, and Cass found that higher levels of leisure writing were associated with higher levels of writing self-efficacy, and also that higher levels of writing anxiety were associated with lower levels of writing self-efficacy: “Although quantity of writing does not predict quality of writing, students who engage in more free writing or leisure writing are able to express themselves creatively through writing without feeling constrained by the rules of grammar or structure of formal writing assignments” (357).  In their final presentations, students demonstrated the creativity that this process had afforded to them. Many had plans for what they would now do with the writing they had produced in the course. Some would produce one or multiple ILPs; others would continue a novel or a memoir; still others would finish the work they had begun on their Advanced Project. All had taken a step toward becoming experienced writers.

            So, as teachers of writing across the SNL curriculum, what does this mean for us? It means that students will further explore issues of a given topic in writing when given the time and a word count benchmark rather than a rubric and a grading scale. It means that encouraging students to journal and freewrite well before a final paper is due will result in more refined and structured final papers. Finally, it means making room for experimentation through writing in courses where students are dealing with new material and new terminology which might make them anxious. Giving our students, and ourselves, time to JustWrite will lead to increased levels of creativity, novice writers more likely to write with the authority that we ask of them, and decreased levels of anxiety among our adult students.

Works Cited

Martinez, Christy Teranishi, Ned Kock, and Jeffrey Cass. “Pain and Pleasure in Short

Essay Writing: Factors Predicting University Students’ Writing Anxiety and Writing Self-Efficacy.” Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy 54.5 (Feb. 2011): 351-360. Print.

Sommers, Nancy. “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult

Writers.” College Composition and Communication 31.4 (Dec. 1980): 378-388. Print.

Sommers, Nancy, and Laura Saltz. “The Novice as Expert: Writing the Freshman

Year.” College Composition and Communication 56.1 (Sep. 2004): 124-149. Print.

Reflections from the 2012 SNL Month of Writing

In the thirty days from October 10 to November 8, fifty SNL students, faculty, and staff participated in the 2012 SNL Month of Writing Challenge. Each participant used the challenge differently; some used the challenge to begin new projects, some used it to focus on their school papers, and others used the challenge to help channel their creative writing juices.  Two writers agreed to share from their experience over the month.  

SNL Faculty member, Jane Wagoner, used the month to begin a blogging project. She says, “While I had never written a blog, I thought this month was the perfect time to begin my blogging career. The writing is different from what I have done before and a lot of fun. I find myself thinking of different topics to write about and reflecting on various literary works. So this month has helped me find my "blogging voice" and I am grateful for the extra motivation that the word count goal provided.”

SNL student, Nikki Knighten, took the 5-week SNL course that accompanied the Month of Writing titled, “WriteNow: National Novel Writing Month.”  Nikki distilled some of her writings from the month into a poem, “Save Me from Myself”: 

The cares of this world arouse me from sleep

I lay thinking, “will I make it through this day?”

I need you Lord to come to save me from myself.

I’ve grown stronger because of my trials. They are companions resting in the recesses of my mind. Always on the ready to move forward and profess the powers that are present. To testify of the muscles that have grown and developed because they had to; because they were strained by burdens and invisible foes.  The fears of the past are done away with. Some making way for new ones; weaker, less threatening new fears which pale in comparison to the old fears "made of good stock." those old fears that shook my existence and made me question my sanity and alliances. Those fears of yesteryear were the "real thing baby"! They played for keeps and didn't easily die. These fears required Herculean tenacity that morphed into crazy faith and fearlessness. There are those who dare to say that my future may be gloomy and despair ridden and there are those who have the gumption to question my fate. Theirs is but one voice in the crowd and but one view on the horizon but the report which I choose to believe is the Lord's. His report is rich with His hope and saturated by His plans for me. I am convinced that they are "of good and not of evil, to an expected end." Whereas many have come and seemingly even more have gone but Your word lingers and abides. It exalts and admonishes, it encourages and it chastens. It punishes the slothfulness and it rewards the diligence.

How will you use the SNL Month of Writing next year? Since we are increasing our departmental goal to 1.5 million words for the 2013 challenge, we’ll need you on board next fall!

Celebrate writing on December 5th with the NWA

Neighborhood Writing Alliance

Publishers of the Journal of Ordinary Thought

presents

 

Body Wisdom

 

A celebration of dynamic movement, creative community, and personal stories throughout Chicago

 

                                               When:     Wednesday, December 5th, 2012

                                               Time:       6:00 - 8:00pm
                                               Where:    Harold Washington Library Center

                                                                Pritzker Auditorium

                                                                400 S. State Street

 

Free and open to the public!

1,131,981 Words

The 2012 SNL Month of Writing has drawn to a close. From October 10 until November 7, SNL Faculty, Staff, and Students accepted the challenge to each write 50,000 words in a month. Our department goal was 1 million words – and we did it! Collectively, SNL produced 1,131,981 words in just 30 days. In recognition of this accomplishment, an anonymous donor will be giving $1,000 to SNL Scholarships!

Special congratulations to these participants that surpassed the personal goal of writing 50,000 words each:

Heather Burlingame, SNL Student

Cynthia Flores, SNL Staff and Student

Cynthia Meehan, SNL Student

Michelle Navarre Cleary, SNL Faculty

Cindy Stevens, SNL Faculty
Shannon Stone, SNL Staff and Student

Steffanie Triller Fry, SNL instructor

Kathryn Wozniak, SNL instructor

This is will be annual challenge and we hope you will join us next year!