Teaching Peer Response
By Olivia Rowland, WIC GTA
For our fall 2022 kickoff event, WIC Director Sarah Tinker Perrault led a workshop on teaching peer response on October 7. The workshop engaged participants in thinking about how they can structure peer response to best support students in giving each other effective feedback.
Dr. Perrault began with a few quick tips for the logistical aspects of peer response. For example, teachers can make peer response run more smoothly if they communicate clearly what students should focus on in their responses, how students will be grouped, and how they should turn in their work. Because students can experience anxiety about reading and commenting on peers’ writing, it can help to do groupwork regularly before introducing peer response. Asking students to turn in a revision statement will also encourage them to revise based on the feedback they receive.
The rest of the workshop was organized around four principles for effective peer response. After learning about each of these principles, participants brainstormed how they could apply them to their own courses.
First, teachers should use peer response at the right stage of the writing process. Although faculty may be accustomed to having students respond to early drafts and receive instructor feedback after peer response, this is not the most efficient order of events. Students need instructor feedback most at the beginning of the process, because faculty have the disciplinary expertise necessary to evaluate students’ topics, scoping, and the quality of their arguments and evidence. Students are more willing to substantially revise earlier in the writing process, and they can give better feedback later on, when they focus on organization and style.
The second principle states that peer response sessions should only attend to a few aspects of writing at a time. A long list of criteria or tasks can overwhelm students as they both respond to each other’s writing and try to revise based on their peers’ feedback. Dr. Perrault suggests that faculty incorporate frequent, low-stakes peer response sessions in which students focus on one or two concerns at a time.
Dr. Perrault went on to explain the third principle of effective peer review: have students describe rather than judge what they are reading. Instead of asking students how well a paper uses transitions, for example, teachers might assign students to identify where a paper uses transitions and where they could use more.
Finally, faculty should teach students how to do peer response. This can involve showing students a model of the type of feedback they should give and having them practice giving that feedback on a sample student essay.
If you would like to learn more about teaching peer response, you can watch a full recording of the workshop or access the workshop slides.
Responding to Student Writing
By Sarah Tinker Perrault, WIC Director
On November 18, WIC Director Dr. Perrault and a group of faculty at OSU Cascades met to talk
about strategies for providing students with useful, formative feedback. The lunch-time event began
with a presentation and guided conversation around tips such as:
- Separate formative feedback and summative judgments
- Start before it’s time to respond by creating a shared language about writing
- Respond at the right stages of the writing process, and focus on a few aspects of writing at each
stage - Respond as a reader rather than as a judge
- Guide revision by saying what is working and say what else readers need
- Use comment banks for frequently used suggestions to make the feedback process more efficient
- Have students write cover letters or otherwise describe their revisions
Dr. Perrault also mentioned that students at all OSU campuses (Cascades, Corvallis, and Ecampus) can
get online synchronous and asynchronous help from the Academic Success Center and the Writing Center.
After the workshop stage was done and catering had cleared away the leftovers from lunch, several
faculty members stayed on and continued the conversation for another couple of hours, with new
people also showing up during that time. Overall, Dr. Perrault and nine faculty members were able to
share ideas and challenges, starting with the topic of giving feedback, and ranging to cover many others
as well.
