During the week, my students had made a mess of the discussion threads. I had set up the peer review forum so that all they had to do to post their drafts was to open their tutors’ intro and hit reply. Instead, they replied to my post, or they created completely new threads, or they replied to their tutors, but changed the subject line so the tutors couldn’t tell where their drafts were. I thought about chewing them out and making them re-do their posts, but I figured they would only get more confused, I would have to answer dozens of questions, and I’d end up more frustrated than before. So I made a mental note to revise the peer review posting instructions (which I did) and I prepared myself to deal with the ensuing chaos.
I had planned to conduct a norming session on formative evaluations with the tutors to discuss ways they could respond to the students’ rough drafts. I wanted to make sure that the comments students received were consistent. I felt students should get the same quality of response no matter which tutor they were assigned to. I also thought a norming session would give us a chance to talk about our methods of responding. I printed out copies of a few sample papers at home, and drove through pounding rain and flooded streets to the downtown Norfolk campus.
My session with the tutors that day reflected some of the chaos I had witnessed among my students’ mangled use of the peer review forum. The situation was out of my control before I even got to the writing center. Only two tutors were there, Ellynne and Lee, and they had already posted their peer reviews, but hadn’t followed the format I outlined the week before. I struggled with my impulses about how to react. Should I try to impose more order and control over the situation—break bad on the tutors—or should I be more flexible and work with the flow? I opted for a gentle nudging toward a more coherent direction and mentally filed the experience under “lessons learned.”
We did talk about the chaos in the peer review forum (they were having trouble figuring out where their students’ drafts were). I told them I could create group areas in Blackboard. Groups have some advantages (less chaos, more control), but the drawbacks are that students can only read and respond to the people in their group. It cuts down on choice and it cuts down on opportunities to read more of their classmates’ drafts. I think students learn much from reading each other’s drafts, especially students who need models for a level of writing that’s just a notch above their own. Managing groups is also more work for me initially, because I would have to post the guidelines in each separate group, but it would probably be less work in the long run, because I wouldn’t have to spend so much time trying to figure out who was responding to whom.
Later, we talked about how to respond to the students’ rough drafts. Lee felt we should challenge them to expand their vocabulary by using words in our reviews that they would have to look up. I was in favor of using simpler words for assignments, instructions, and peer reviews— students should certainly be challenged by the texts they read, but when teachers and tutors communicate with students, I think our primary purpose is to be understood quickly and easily.
Lee and Ellynne both had questions about the peer review guidelines. The first three items in the guidelines address the introductory paragraph: Is there enough background info? Is the thesis clear? Does the writer’s purpose come through clearly? Lee and Ellynne suggested that the items about thesis and purpose could be combined because one affects the other. They also felt that background wasn’t relevant to the assignment, which is to write a letter to a child or parent explaining a value that they hold. I agreed that background may not matter for that assignment but the writing situation does. So I decided to revise the peer review guidelines for the next semester.
