By giving and receiving feedback
Students help each other write

Giving and receiving feedback is part and parcel of working on a team, and teamwork is an essential part of the 21st century workplace.

You have several terms you could use to describe classroom collaborative learning activities in which one student helps another with improving a piece of writing. Depending on the ages of your students, you could use terms like

Unlike peer review, which carries negative connotations, all these terms are neutral.

I personally like the term peer conferencing, but you should choose a term that will make sense to your students in your teaching situation.

What are peers?

If you pick a term that uses the word peer, you must define the term for students. Since peer can be a noun or a verb, and it sounds the same as pier, students are apt to misunderstand what it means.

Peers are people of equal status in a specific setting. Students who are peers in English class may not be peers on the soccer field or youth orchestra.

In a classroom setting, the peers are students who have a common experience responding to a specific course assignment.

Some collaborative writing activities may work best if team members have approximately equal writing skills; others work best if members have different writing skills or different writing strengths.

Securing student buy-in

If you want students to participate in giving and receiving feedback on writing, you need a way of motivating learners to participate. (That is doubly important if you hang on to the term peer review.)

The key to getting students to participate is this sentence:

"Your partner will help you get a better grade if you also help your partner get a better grade."

That sentence takes collaborative learning out of the realm of "dumb stuff the teacher makes us do" and elevates it to a useful activity. Even students who don't care much about grades prefer a higher grade to a lower one if getting the higher one is not too much trouble.

Model giving and receiving feedback

Students need not only to hear about how to go about giving and receiving feedback on their writing but also see a conference. (Miss Grundy, the formidable English department chairperson, refers to such demos as modeling, which makes the eighth grade boys snicker.)

You will need a partner to help you model the process. Ask a good student or another teacher to help. Ideally, both you and your partner should each respond to an essay prompt under the same conditions (for example, both answer in a half hour) and use what you wrote for the demo.

Let the class watch as you go through a complete review cycle in which both you and your partner take turns as reader and writer, giving and receiving feedback so the writer can take appropriate action.

In your demonstration, be sure the feedback includes

• Praise for activities done well.

• Questions about things that aren't clear.

• Encouragement for the writer who is responsible for repairs to his or her own work.

Giving and receiving feedback at in the pre-writing stages of writing process can be even more effective in improving students' writing than such help after composition is finished. My Talk It Out materials are used in the teaching writing students to use a strategic "pre-writing" process.