YWP Week 7: Teaching trust, a classroom exercise

By Nick Brooks
Language Arts Teacher
Williston Central School

Sharing ourselves with others is, at its simplest level, a lesson in trust. When we meet new people, our thoughts and expressions are often guarded in the uncertainty of how others will feel and react to what we think and believe.

As writers, our fear intensifies because we cannot qualify our statements of opinion with a ‘sort of’ or ‘maybe’ to preserve our safe ambiguity. The very act of writing — committing our private ideas into a more public space — demands great courage. We write to express emotion, to tell stories or to understand the world around us, but, consciously or not, we are always writing for a particular audience.

For most young writers, the audience often consists of parents and teachers, two immediate and, at least in their eyes, biased groups. Students are so accustomed to receiving feedback from these audiences that many dismiss their questions, look beyond their comments and even willfully ignore their suggestions. In the students’ minds, if the parent and teacher praise them, it’s because a parent or teacher is supposed to appreciate everything they write. And if students encounter criticism, they may glaze over the critique quickly as if in some family battle over taking out the trash.

So how can students get meaningful feedback? From their peers. If fellow students cannot find the main idea, the student authors take notice.

Harnessing and directing the power of this peer feedback is a key element in a successful writing group — of any age.

Trust by design
The value of peer editing is essential to creating a writing workshop in the classroom. In our class we assign pairs of students to review each piece of writing.

The important first step is to foster trust. By emphasizing praise in early peer conferences, trust develops naturally. Peer editors compliment the writer by finding the positive. At this stage, the most difficult task is to help students identify these strengths and to communicate them with precision.

As trust continues to develop with praise, it fosters confidence in peer editors to begin to question the author, circling things that are unclear and making more critical comments. When the opportunity for criticism is introduced, specificity is crucial as the relationship from peer to author is analogous to the understanding a reader hopes to gain from the ideas in a piece of writing.

A common language
For peer conferences to function at their highest level, students must learn to communicate with a shared language. Not unlike a mathematics or science classroom, a writing classroom has its own unique vocabulary. Students must understand the intention of an introduction and a conclusion, the importance of the main idea or focus and the value of a transition before they can evaluate the effectiveness of another’s writing.

In addition to fundamental writing terms, students may need to be exposed to more genre-specific nomenclature like the counter-argument in persuasive writing, supporting facts in a report, or the climax in a narrative. For each writing piece, outline specific areas of focus for the editors to look for and be certain that all students understand the meaning of each term.

Valued feedback
In our class, each writing piece receives written comments from at least two other students, providing the author with a diversity of feedback.
To aid in the effectiveness of the process, a conference form is developed for each piece. Though some elements are universal in all of our conferences — finding areas of praise, asking questions, offering suggestions — there are other essential ingredients. Editors are asked to:

• find and identify the main idea;
• check for adequate supporting facts;
• and list those facts in abbreviated fashion.

The student editors have their own authentic task to complete in this step of the process. Students learn to approach the work of their peers seriously because they demand the same critical eye in response to their own writing. Value is placed not in the swiftness of the student review, but in the quality of their efforts. Students and the teacher evaluate the student work as peer editors using the peer conference forms as evidence.

Let the voices be heard
As most teachers already use some peer response system in their classroom, greater success in this area may be as simple as a renewed emphasis on these interactions or the employment of new design features in the current model. When we completed our final peer conferencing session last spring, students shared and posted responses to the question, “What makes peer editing important?” Their words speak for themselves:

• “We peer edit because sometimes your peers can give you advice that your teacher can’t”
• “We peer edit to realize the mistakes in our own papers when we see other people make them.”
• “Peer editing is a fancy name for constructive criticism. It’s like rabies shots —they save your life, but they hurt.”
• “Peer editing helps because what makes sense to you might not make sense to others-and it's good to find that out.”

In his book, “A Fresh Look at Writing,” Donald Graves leaves us a concise lesson: “With so little time to teach we have to decide what endures.”