The article "Awesome, dude!" clearly states two main points essential to teaching students how to revise writing constructively. One: Teachers must model the revision process and how, when done succesfully, it can greatly develop a story. Two: Students need scaffolding when learning the importance of revision. We as teachers cannot simply tell them that revising and providing constructive criticism will make the story stronger without actually teaching them the process of revising. We also cannot expect students to know how to revise critically just because they are in advanced courses or have been participating in workshops for X amount of time.
While I agree that modeling and scaffolding are good approaches to take when teaching a lesson, the author of this article (in my opinion) seemed to think that the problem in most writing workshops is that students don't know how to critique papers effectively. Therefore, he demonstrates how we as teachers can teach this process to students to help sharpen their writing skills. But I am not sure that the problem is that students don't know how to give peer reviews. It may be that the idea of reading and critiquing schoolmates papers is cso onstantly driven into them that they have completely lost interest in it over the years. In my high school, we had to do peer reviews ALL the time. Although we had learned how to critique papers, the majority of us would rather talk than take time to closely read our peers work. So although VanDeWeghe makes the argument that students just don't know how to critique peer essays, I would debate that students do--they simply are sick of the traditional process of peer reviewing. Instead of teaching the basics of peer reviewing again to students, I think we should come up with more creative approaches to structuring peer review workshops in the classroom.
Resource Link: http://iteslj.org/Techniques/Gibson-PeerReview.html
If you scroll down to the procedure step in this article, you will see a more creative and interactive way to structure peer reviewing workshops. It deviates from the traditional model of swapping papers and provides (in my opinion) a much more engaging approach.
Hey Corrie
ReplyDeleteI agree that students have not only lost interest in critiquing other students in this way but there is also the peer pressure issue. The article failed to mention how sensitive students are at this age and I think students are afraid to comment negatively on other students' paper for fear of social rejection. In the creative writing class the "cool" kids don't really get negative comments where as the "less than cool" do. Perhaps a blind peer editing session would benefit both parties?