I am not the master of having kids review each other’s
written work. It isn’t that I haven’t tried it before. I have. Many times. And
it invariably goes something like this: “Class, I want you to get with another
person. I want them to read your story and offer suggestions about how to
improve it.” I try to model and give suggestions about how this might work, and
it always seems to go well when we do this as a class with something I’ve
written. But once they get with a peer, it takes about 30 seconds before both
students announce that they’re done. I’ll ask, “What changes did you make?”,
and the kids will say, “We didn’t need to make any. My partner thought what I wrote
was really good.” I will smile,
and cringe inwardly, because I know that changes could be made. Revision is challenging for good
writers, let alone ten year olds, and once something is down on paper, most of
us don’t want to change it.
Happily, I was visiting with one of my very dearest friends,
who is a teacher librarian at a middle school, and she teaches a writing
workshop for sixth graders. She
told me about having her students revise by having them ask each other
questions. “They need to ask the other person something that will allow the writer
to give more information,” she suggested.
I liked the sound of this because it was more concrete than
other revision directions I had tried. My teaching colleague tried this a week
before I did, and had really good results with kids writing short essay/opinion
paragraphs. I tried it with our Slice of Life writings. As soon as the draft
was done, they got together with a partner, and either read the slice, or had
it read to them. I wanted them to write their question on a post it note, so
that I could easily see what it was. I also wanted to see if the writer
incorporated the answer to the question in their revision. (We did this as a
class first before working in pairs.) The pieces I’ve seen so far showed much improvement over
their first draft, and the students seemed engaged and on task when they were
working with each other, so I’m encouraged by this effort. One of the things I
have to evaluate is whether they use the writing process, and making revisions
meets this goal.
I’m looking forward to trying this more as we write more
Slice of Life pieces and also begin working on our essays. Have you tried peer
revision with any success? What strategies have been useful?
