Volume XXXVII, No. 25 | October 30, 2015

Peer Revision: Build Classroom Writing Community Through Academic Conversation

It is hard to teach writing in a quiet classroom because writing is a conversation. For students to be successful academic writers, they need to be successful academic conversationalists, especially in Composition II’s hallmark genre, argument writing. Argument writing requires writers to lead readers through a path of reasoned ideas. Throughout argument essays, writers push back on behalf of readers by offering counter-claims and sources representing opposing voices. It is hard to teach writing in a noisy classroom because of attention issues, but a quiet classroom can be even more overwhelming.

Once upon a time, I taught writing in the noisiest of classrooms—a middle school gifted education classroom. For seventh graders, conversations never end. They talk about each other, themselves, their teachers, and their assignments. They laugh at jokes that are not funny, they present non-sequiturs as profundities, and they participate in almost any discussion as either conversants, active listeners, or critics. When they wrote, words flowed unevenly as they tried to apply the filters of correctly spelled words, limited time, and dwindling supplies of .05 lead refills.

My adventures in teaching community college English classes coincided with my adventures of working on the College Ready Writers Program (CRWP) with the National Writing Project after I left the middle school. I am a teacher consultant for the Oklahoma State University Writing Project (OSUWP), and I am a member of a small team that helps rural classroom teachers build argument writing into their secondary school curricula. While I was working with middle school and high school teachers and students on writing, an opportunity to teach college writing opened up, and I walked into my new classroom fortified with my CRWP mini-units and our college textbook.

The most immediate and perceptible difference between my middle school class and my community college class was the noise level. For my composition students, the whispered exchanges ended as quickly as they started. My students didn’t seem to know my name, much less each other’s names. They courteously nodded to answer questions—even though the questions went beyond “yes” or “no” answers. In the forced, artificial class discussions, students raised their hands and politely conceded any debatable point.

This silence would not help students become successful writers. I knew that several of my students were repeating English because they had not passed it during the previous semester. None of my students were English majors; their quick writes collectively demonstrated that they were a group of students who did not write on a regular basis. I became determined to make them have discussions with one another and with me.

For the first time in 17 years, I had a class that didn’t talk. They didn’t take the bait when I mentioned Doctor Who or Monty Python or Stephen Colbert. They respectfully nodded. “Yes,” they seemed to say. “Yes, we are aware of cultural phenomena.” When we read an essay in our textbook from Me Talk Pretty One Day, no one laughed. I made them watch a Sedaris reading on YouTube so they would understand it was funny. There were mild smiles as the recorded audience and I laughed.

“David Sedaris gave me a birthday gift one time,” I said to the unchanging expressions of the mild-mannered college students. I sighed. “Don’t you even want to know what it was?”
One considerate student asked me if I wanted to tell them about the gift.

“Not really,” I said. “Because you people never laugh at anything. So if I tell you about the birthday gift, you better act impressed.” I paused for dramatic effect, even though no dramatic tension could grow in such mild soil. “He gave me shampoo! From his hotel room!”

Were you in his hotel room?” Suddenly, some interest. “No,” I said. “I was in line at a book signing, and my daughter told him it was my birthday. He said he collected hotel shampoo for just those kinds of occasions, and he gave me the shampoo. It was from a very expensive hotel.”

They fell back into silence, and our class continued our routine of silence. The students would walk in, open their composition books, and respond to the daily Quick Write prompt while the attendance sign-in sheet circulated. If I promised participation points, they would share their quick writes with their nearest neighbor. We would move through our lesson, and whenever the objective required participation, I bought their words with the participation points that I dutifully marked on Blackboard after class. We would finish early and read in class because our discussions were short and pointed.

Because I follow the Writing Project philosophy of organic, reflective writing, I knew that we would have peer revision as part of our composition class lessons. I saw how well revision works in the CRWP grant classrooms, and I regret that I didn’t give enough time for peer revision in my middle school classroom. However, peer revision requires peer communication, and even a month into class my students did not know the names of most of the people in the classroom. Ice Breaker games only work if there is ice to be broken. These students got along fine in the anonymous, lukewarm way that they will someday get along with their neighbors and co-workers. You don’t need to know someone’s name to be nice.

I started my peer revision lesson with our OSUWP PowerPoint, which explains that revision offers a chance to see an essay through someone else’s eyes. I explained that this was not peer editing. “In fact,” I reminded them, “the college has free writing tutors available for people who need help with lower-order concerns like grammar, mechanics, and formatting.”

This seemed to relieve students. They were new to MLA formatting, and they were as dependent on Microsoft Word’s spellcheck as the next student. I could see the liberation that the distinction between peer revision and peer editing offered. I moved on through the PowerPoint to explain the process of peer revision.

“You’re joining the conversation that already exists in the essay,” I said, “and you are going to offer some insights and comments and questions. You’ll offer them praise.” Gently, their quiet faces nodded. “This means you have to read the essay,” I said, “and you have to talk to each other. You have to say what you like about the essay. You have to ask a question about it.” More nods.

The students sat in pairs and silently read each other’s essay. “Do you like your essay?” a student would offer as an insightful question. The students all offered the same praise: “I like your essay.” I stopped them. Peer revision is valuable, but it takes a lot of class-time. If it is going to be done, it needs to be done correctly.

Instead of pairs, we moved into groups. Because of our class makeup, we were able to have a group of about six women and five men. I gave them a Post-it® Note and told them to write their specific comment on the Post-it® note, and then put it on the part of the essay they were complimenting or questioning. I banned “like” as a word they could use.

After students read the essays and wrote on the Post-it® notes, they passed them to the person on their right. Students have different reading and response times, so in their groups, they would talk quietly. At first, they were too well-behaved to comment on anything except the essay. “Your handwriting is pretty,” one student said. “It could be a font.”

By the time the groups finished passing around the notebooks, they were engaged in regular college-student conversations about parking, vending machine prices, and telling stories about their hometowns. These restrained, sensible conversations thrilled me. This relaxed, convivial environment meant good things in my middle school classroom, and I suspected the same would happen for my college students.
“Now look at the Post-it® notes,” I said. “The people around you wrote them. You need to answer their questions.” One of the students raised a hand. “We should have signed the Post-it® notes,” he pointed out. “We don’t know who wrote what.” I hadn’t thought of that. In the other classrooms where we had done peer revision, the students had used foldables and worked with a partner. However, those were secondary classrooms and this was college. “Figure it out,” I said. And they did.

My Comp 1 students wrote four essays that went through peer revision, and each peer revision cycle looked a little bit different. Sometimes the groups changed, sometimes they assigned people to read just the introductions and just the conclusions, and sometimes they highlighted sections and discussed them instead of using Post-it® notes. Peer Revision Day became the highlight of the essay draft process, and each time I could see my class growing into a community that communicated; they depended on being able to see their papers through each other’s eyes. They became friends in the downtime of waiting on essays to get passed around. By the end of the semester, some students would read sections aloud to the entire class and ask for comments and questions.

By ensuring that the comments are always positive and the questions are just inquiries, not commands to make changes, peer revision becomes a thoughtful process that encourages communication between writers. I have several of my Comp I students in my Comp II class, and the kinship from last semester carried into this semester. When I told my Comp II students to bring their rough drafts to the next class for peer revision, worried looks flashed over some of the students who didn’t know me well. Since it was the first month of class, they were not yet talking to me or to each other. I asked my former students to describe Comp I Peer Revisions. One student assured them, “It’s easy. You just read a couple of people’s essays, and they read yours, and everyone talks about it.” The students looked even more worried. “You’ll have Post-it® notes,” another student offered helpfully. “It’s just a conversation about writing.”

And those are the words a writing teacher in any classroom, noisy or quiet, loves to hear—peer revision is just a conversation about writing.

Alexandra Sharp, Adjunct Professor, Composition

For further information, contact the author at Northern Oklahoma College, P.O. Box 310, Tonkawa, OK 74653-0310. Email: Alexandra.sharp@noc.edu