Approaching Authentic Peer Review

By Author: Adela
Total Articles: 74
Comment this article

Peer review remains a challenging practice for teachers and students at all levels. I remember, when I first taught high school, attempting many different versions of peer review, including detailed prompts, modeling, and different routines for different drafts; I also experimented with peer review in class, as homework, and with different sizes of groups. When I entered graduate Omega Replica school and began teaching college composition, I thought I had finally hit on an approach that worked, one that I called a "read-aloud protocol" based on Karen Schriver's reader-protocol teaching ("Revising"). I loved it: students found it worthwhile and made good revisions based on the feedback they received, and colleagues, when they heard about it, tried it and liked it.

While I still employ the method, which I will describe in greater length later, I have begun to see weaknesses in the ways I have used it in my college classrooms. The tools that students have used for peer review have differed from those they used for their other reading in the class, and they continued ...
... to respond to each other's papers with some eye toward "fixing" them rather than as readers trying to understand them. As I have been trying to make the writing assignments students do for me more authentic (see, for example, Conner and Moulton; Kixmiller; Lindblom), I hoped for more consistently authentic, "readily" responses. I wanted students to engage in authentic writing to master the complex decisions authors must confront when they compose for real audiences. That decision-making could benefit most from "real" reader feedback, not feedback aimed—however helpfully—at correcting the paper.

I began to see the problem as less related to what peer-review strategy I used and more to the place of peer review in the ongoing literacy curriculum. If students are to respond to each other's drafts as they would to published texts, they need practice responding to published texts as they would each other's drafts. Because of its emphasis on reading strategies and met cognition, the read-aloud protocol strategy provides an especially good example of a way to build such practice into the ongoing literacy curriculum. Some scholars writing about improving students' reading and integrating reading and writing instruction suggest using think-aloud techniques to teach students reading comprehension skills (e.g., Beers; Olson; Wilhelm). Using think aloud to teach reading comprehension and then the read-aloud protocol technique (which is based on think-aloud) for peer review has two Breitling Replica Watches major benefits for students: because students practice thinking aloud with published texts before they do so with each other's texts, they build the habit of thinking aloud to understand rather than to "fix"; and, because students return during peer review to explicit reading strategies, they become more strategic readers.