Virtual Peer Review: Using Blackboard to Create the Writing Workshop Environment. Shelley Aley and Pavel Zemliansky James Madison University

Transcription

1 Virtual Peer Review: Using Blackboard to Create the Writing Workshop Environment Shelley Aley and Pavel Zemliansky James Madison University Introduction: The Role of Peer Review in the Writing Classroom Before we begin discussing the use of Blackboard for student peer review sessions, it important to consider the role of peer review in writing theory and pedagogy and conditions under which effective peer review sessions can be organized and conducted. Instructional technology should be driven by theory and pedagogy in the field, and understanding this connection should help both developers and users of such instructional technology to be more efficient and creative in their work. We will get to the specifics of using Bb for peer review a little later. For now, though, we would like to set up the theoretical and pedagogical foundations for the use of Bb for peer review sessions. Contemporary theories and pedagogies of composition consider peer review of student papers extremely important. In most writing and writing intensive classes, students are expected to participate in peer revision and editing workshops, during which they critique their colleagues papers at various stages of the writing process and have their papers critiqued by other in turn. Peer review sessions are practiced at every stage of the writing process: from invention and critiquing of a first, very rough draft of a paper, to a full-blown workshop of a complete draft, to working with the style and mechanics of a paper as the process of writing it nears completion. We re finding that peer review can effectively be conducted in courses across the disciplines, and not just in English and writing courses. Peer review can be used to examine and critique paper proposals, to encourage writing in preparation for later writing assignments, and for student-on-student response to assigned papers. Peer review can play an important role in engaging students in the discipline s discourse. Through a series of low-stakes writing assignments (informal writing assignments that are not weighted as much as later, high-stakes assignments), students can take risks and respond to each other using terms and conventions they will need to master in order to become effective writers in the course. After all, sometimes the discourse of a discipline can seem like a foreign language. Students need ways to practice interacting in a new discourse community before being required to write formal papers. Bb can be the virtual place where students can engage in low-stakes discourse experiences, and in the process of learning how to speak and write in a particular discipline, the students can develop the sense of community essential in a good class.

2 2 We use the term peer review and not peer editing for an important reason. Scholars in writing pedagogy point out that when students talk about revising a paper, they seldom use the term revision. Many refer to the activity we d like to see them engage in as fixing a paper. In other words, they think of the activity as merely editing surface features, and not re-envisioning or re-seeing their work. When they use a writing center, students often tend to refer to the work they do there as getting their paper corrected. Getting something fixed or corrected implies that competent authorship lies outside of the student s realm. Quite to the contrary, the author should become the authority. In writing instruction, we seek to center authorship in the writer, to help the writer become the authority. The purpose of peer review is to gradually internalize the writer s authority over his or her own text. The author, however, needs to learn how to become that authority. Peer review, when conducted effectively, helps accomplish this goal. It is difficult to engage students in the idea and process of revision. Students tend to adopt the mind set of passive receiver. They want to know what we want, what it will take to get a good grade. Peer review is active, not passive. What we call this activity is important in developing the students understanding of the role they play and the kind of work they are being asked to do. In the process of peer review, the peer acts as the second seer, the one who plays the role of the author s internal critic. Part of the reader s job is to re-see the paper for the writer, who has seen the paper so much in the process of writing it that he or she can no longer see it. Early peer review sessions concentrate on the paper itself, not on surface details, which in revision may change markedly. As Pavel pointed out, editing for style, grammar, and mechanics will come later. In a typical peer review session a class is split into small workshop groups (usually 3 or 4 students per group). The students are instructed to provide copies of their papers to every member of the group and, then, usually given instructions as to what issues or questions to attend to during the workshop. In a face-to-face writing class, every member of the group then proceeds to read his or her paper out loud with the other members following on their copies. Students are then required to provide both written and oral feedback to the draft in order to help the author revise or edit. While the most effective way to conduct peer review may be having students read their papers aloud to group members (who either follow along with a hard copy of the paper or not), peer review can also be conducted through silent reading, although this approach has its downfalls that we need to be aware of. Conducting peer review in the Bb environment will require students to read each others papers and review them. Care must be taken to prevent the student readers from merely editing the work. Student readers will tend to get hung up on surface faults such as spelling, grammar, and mechanics, and ignore the overall paper in their comments. It is also important to prevent the students from explaining their papers to their group members before reviewing them. Although

3 3 this tends to be more of a problem in face-to-face peer review than it is in the virtual environment, I remind my students that when their work goes out to their readers, the author won t go with the paper. The paper must be able to stand on its own. Too much explanation (spoken or in an ) will affect the way the way the reader sees and understands the paper. If an author wants a good reading from his or her peers, for all intents and purposes, the author should remain silent and let the paper speak for itself. There are several reasons, both pedagogical and logistical, for such a prominent role of peer review in writing classes. First of all, students are encouraged to write not only for the teacher but for a larger audience. Their classmates provide such an audience. Secondly, the process model of composing on which most writing courses are based encourages students to see themselves as writers, albeit novice writers, and to learn not only to hear feedback from the teachers, but also from their colleagues. Moreover, students are encouraged and taught how to provide such feedback to other members of the writing class as needed. The practice of peer review helps students to internalize the voice of the reader, so that he or she can better understand and meet the reader s needs. Students demonstrating a lack of audience awareness learn from their readers, for example, that providing background information may be crucial for understanding the relevance of an issue, that defining key terms may be essential in communicating with the reader, and that providing sufficient illustration and example may be necessary in moving a reader toward agreement. After a few peer review sessions, I hear my students say in conferences what they now realize they must do for their readers in order to satisfy and engage them. This is in marked contrast to the novice writer, who seldom considers audience when writing an academic paper. Finally, if properly prepared and orchestrated, peer review workshops can greatly help the often-overworked and over-extended teacher in running the class. Welltrained and experienced student readers can be just about as useful in providing content and mechanics advice to their peers as the teacher. According to contemporary composition pedagogy, in order to improve, writers do not need to be constantly corrected by the teacher. Instead, at most stages of the writing process, it is preferable that students receive feedback from their peers in a nonthreatening, low stakes environment, that they see themselves as members of a community of writers rather than as novices who will always be corrected and evaluated by the teacher. In a word, then, peer review sessions help students to improve as writers, readers, and editors. They increase their confidence as writers and help create the atmosphere of genuine collaboration in the writing classroom.

4 4 Conditions for Effective Peer Review Sessions There are several conditions essential for effective peer review in the writing classroom. These conditions can be separated into long-term and short-term and are relevant for peer review workshops conducted both using Bb and in other instructional environments, either face to face or online. The long-term conditions are built by the members of the class community over time, and may take weeks or even months to develop. Creating the short-term conditions is primarily the teacher s responsibility, and they can be created fairly quickly through sound class management and attention to detail. The way in which the teachers creates those short-term conditions affects the creation of long-term ones because, obviously, students take cues from their instructor and often model their own behavior in the classroom on what they see their teacher do. Long-Term Conditions 1. Trust among the members of a review group. In other words, each members of a review team must understand that other group members are there not to evaluate him or her but to help with revision or editing. By viewing student peer-reviews, the instructor can note examples of good responses and share them in class. Using positive examples will reinforce the role of the peer reviewer as responsive reader, not critic. 2. Willingness of each group member not only to fulfill the minimum tasks set forth by the teacher, but also to go beyond that minimum in their written and oral response to each other s drafts. Again, by praising the job well done, instructors can reinforce the kind of work they want the peer review to accomplish. Instructors can assign points for peer review to encourage participation, but using positive examples to illustrate what a good peer review looks like is most effective for teaching the class how to respond. 3. Understanding of writing as revision and re-writing, not fixing of errors. One of the most difficult tasks an instructor has is getting students beyond the fixit mentality when it comes to peer review. At JMU, we have an online journal of first-year composition papers. The editors usually include a paper and its drafts to illustrate how revision can improve a paper. Along with the paper and its drafts, the editors usually include a piece of writing by the student author where he or she discusses the revision process. If an instructor doesn t have a resource such as the one I just described, he or she could save a successful student paper and its drafts to share with future students. An instructor could also invite a student to come to class the following semester and talk about how peer review and

5 5 revision led to a better paper. We encourage instructors to find ways to engage students in a writing process, and go beyond the end-product mentality that can many times lead to terrible writing. Short-Term Conditions 1. Clarity of goals and instructions from the teacher to the students. The teacher must not only explain the goals of each workshop to the students, but also convince them of the importance of working on specific aspects of the draft during a particular peer review session. I like to involve my students in activities that will lead to the development of the goals. For example, I always give written assignments something necessary in the online environment. I engage the students in generating a description of an excellent paper. What would that paper do? What would it look like? In describing the excellent paper, the students develop the mindset to write an excellent paper and later to read their group member s papers and comment on them. I also like to model peer response by responding to a paper the students write early in the semester. As Pavel pointed out, students often model their behavior on what they see their instructors do. 2. Balance between giving instructions and trusting review group members to come up with ways of sustaining the workshop session. If a peer review group is locked in too much by the teacher s directions, its members, especially if they are inexperienced writers may believe that following the rules is the only thing that matters. When I stepped in for another instructor a couple of years ago when she had to be out of town, I witnessed what can happen when students become too locked in. Before leaving, my colleague dutifully created a detailed peer review guide for her students to follow. The students took about five minutes per paper to answer the questions. Many of the answers were merely one-word replies, like yes or no. I could see little use in the activity, which the students completed in about 15 or 20 minutes, depending on the size of each group. The exercise did not engage the students, because authority, again, lay in the hands of someone outside of themselves. Unengaged and under peer pressure to complete the task quickly, they were all able to leave class early. 3. Giving each member of a review group an equal chance to share his or her writing and to comment on other writers work. In Bb-based environments, this means making sure that all review group members have access to the technology and know how to operate it.

6 6 While students signing up for an online course should have technology sufficient to open Bb, not all students will have the same word processing software, and even different versions of the same software can cause unequal conditions, especially during peer review. For example, while Microsoft Word enables readers to insert comments into a paper, those comments may be viewed differently and more or less effectively, depending on the version of Word the student has. We believe the authors of Bb should develop an effective component in Bb that will enable peer review without the use of word processing software (more on this later). Using Bb to Organize and Conduct Effective Peer Review Sessions In this section, we would like to share some of the approaches and techniques we have used to organize and conduct peer review sessions in Bb. Users of Bb will know that peer review sessions can be set up and carried out either using the Group function or via the Discussion Board function. Each function has its advantages and disadvantages, and teachers should choose them depending on their teaching philosophies and goals in the classroom. Using the Group function of Bb to conduct peer review sessions allows for a tight class and small group management. It allows students within each group to have a private review space that cannot be used or seen by others in the classroom. Students can also use their small group s discussion forum and chat room, if enabled by the teacher. Obviously, these features are beneficial if teachers want each workshop group to have more privacy online. On the other hand, using the discussion forum of Bb allows the class to create a public space where everyone sees everyone else s work. The teacher may enable the attachment function that would allow students to upload files with their papers. In that case, everyone enrolled in the class can leave comments to every paper in the discussion forum, thus creating a truly public space online and allowing all the students in the class to learn from each other rather than limiting the interaction to each small group. Some Practical Advice In Bb, I like to use the group areas to set up the peer review sessions. I ve experimented in the past with groups of three or four students. However, when teaching online, I ve discovered that participation in peer review can slack off during the semester, compared to participation in face-to-face classes. To prevent one member of a small group from ruining the peer-review experience for the rest of the group, through a lack of participation, I ve begun to make my groups larger five or six members, instead of three or four. I limit the number of reviews each session to three, although I encourage students to read all group

7 7 members papers, to get a good sense of how other writers are responding to the assignment. 1. I set up peer review using the small-group Discussion Board area, which I can enable for each group. I set up each peer review session clearly in separate Discussion Boards in each group. Sessions are appropriately scheduled on my course outline and clearly visible in Bb. Written instructions are supplied in Course Documents for each peer review session. Students know when and where to conduct peer review, because I reinforce the assignment by posting permanent announcements to the announcement page as the date for each peer review approaches. 2. In the class Discussion Board the one that all member of the class can access together I leave permanent instructions for students to go to their small-group s Discussion Board area to conduct peer review. I reserve the class-wide Discussion Board for large-group discussions. 3. In each peer review session, I have each group member create a thread to which he or she attaches his or her paper. 4. During peer review, group members go into their group Discussion Board area, open a thread, and retrieve a paper. They are instructed to read three papers that have not already been reviewed three times. In the Discussion Board environment, it is easy to see which papers have already been reviewed three times. My students experience confusion and frustration during peer review when I ve used the file-exchange area to download papers and responses for peer review. To avoid this reaction from my students, I like using the small-group Discussion Boards, ones created for each peer-review session. They help the students stay organized, because the work is neatly arranged there for ease of viewing. 5. Students can comment on a paper, save it as a new file, and then attach it to a reply thread. Reply threads responding to each author s main thread organize the responses using an outline format for easy viewing. It is clear which responses go with which paper, because Bb indents replies to a thread and places them directly beneath it. 6. After reading a paper, a student can also make his or her responses in the reply thread itself. I like how this approach keeps students from writing directly on a peer s paper. It keeps them from merely editing a paper and focuses them, instead, on responding to it. 7. I generally give students 48 hours to conduct peer review. They have one deadline for posting their papers and another deadline for posting reviews. I have found that the following steps must be taken in order to ensure a smooth and useful peer review session in Bb. I typically use the Groups function of Bb to conduct peer reviews sessions. 1. Before even splitting the class into small workshop groups, spend time with students discussing the fundamentals of peer responding. For this purpose, I use Richard Straub s excellent article Responding, Really

8 responding to Other Students Writing, which provides novice writers with a set of accessible steps towards becoming a better responder. Please note that this applies both to face-to-face and online writing classes. 2. After the students have had a chance to read the article and discuss the fundamentals of effective peer review, both orally and in writing, on Bb s discussion forum or through other means, it is time to assign them to peer review groups. If you choose to use the Group function on Bb, now is also the time to create those groups. I typically enable all the functions in the small groups, except for the chat room. I have found that students prefer asynchronous communication with each other to synchronous. 3. I then make sure that each student knows which group he or she has been assigned. In face-to-face classes where I use the Group function for peer review, I typically conduct the first review session in class. During that session, students get a chance to get comfortable working with each other. In an online class, before assigning a full-scale review session, I invite the students to do a few ice-breaking activities on the group s discussion board, such as an introduction, telling their histories as readers and writers, and so on. 4. I then post detailed instructions for the review session on the web site, typically in the Announcements section, and go through the instructions with the whole class, taking questions and addressing any concerns that students may have. I believe that it is important to keep the instructions on the common space of Bb rather than posting them separately to each review group s space because that gives students a continuing sense of community in the class. An example of such instructions from a class that I am currently teaching can be seen on this slide. This is a face-to-face first year writing class, in which I use the group function of Bb for online peer review. 5. The students then upload their files to the group space and the workshop begins. I usually allow hours for a group of 4 students to finish their work. This means downloading all other group members files, reading them, and leaving specific written comments on the margins, typically using MSWord s comment function. After that, the students upload their papers back to the group site. 6. A note on the use of the group discussion forums. I find them to be useful spaces where students can discuss their work and simply chat, but they function well only if the teacher takes time to create favorable conditions for such exchanges. Simply telling students to post things on the discussion board will usually not be enough. On the other hand, giving students too many instructions may create the impression that the teacher is taking the group space over. Therefore, I prefer to invite students to participate in the discussion forums, but usually do not insist that they use them all the time. After all, my main purpose is to get them to comment on each other s papers, and group discussion forums are nice add-ons. 7. After the review work is complete, it is useful to ask each student in the review group to post an executive summary of his or her responses to 8

9 9 others, whether on the small group discussion board or on the class discussion board. This not only provides the teachers with the means to monitor the activity of various students, but also to help students vocalize and conceptualize their work as responders to other writers. A Word on the Role of the Teacher During and After the Workshop As I mentioned earlier, it is important to set clear instructions and to let students know that you will be watching what goes on in their review group. At the same time, it is crucial not to take over the review space and the review process. Student writers, especially, novice writers, need to know at all times that they have a low-threat, low-stakes writing space to revise and to experiment. At the same time, they need to know that help is always available when they require it. Process-based composition pedagogy sees the creation of each written work as a process of re-writing, re-thinking, and re-imagining, where only the last draft in a series of drafts should be formally evaluated and graded. I have found that the small group discussion forum provides me as a teacher with an excellent space to raise concerns or ask questions of the students if I need to, without overtaking their workshop and review space. Limitations of the Current Bb Platform Despite the impressive peer review capabilities of the current versions of Bb, there are some significant limitations that we would like addressed in the future releases of the platform. 1. Bb remains a very teacher-centered platform. The teacher has to initiate every function, set every permission, and decide what students can do in their review space. I d like to see students be able to take more initiative by setting up their own discussion forums or chat rooms, for example. This would work well with the stated and implied goal of most writing classes, which is the development of student independence and initiative as readers, writers, and responders. The kind of freedom students can experience using Bb, when given more responsibility for setting up their own discussion forums or chat rooms, will lead to a greater sense of authority and, thus, authorship. It will also lead to a more community-based environment, where students can feel freer to share ideas and collaborate with each other on projects. These activities can lead to the creation of a community-based learning experience, the kind of experience we strive to create in the writing classroom. 2. We d like to give students the ability to respond to each other s papers without having to upload and download them as Word files in the Group space. Such a function exists in the competing packages such as MyComplab (Longman) and WriteSpace (Bedford St. Martin s). Having

10 10 this capability would also allow students to see the aggregated comments of all their colleagues in one place rather than having to download three or four separate files and collating the comments or having to remember them. While students can use the versions feature in Word to create the aggregated comments that Pavel mentions, not all students have Word, and even when they do have Word, not all will have the same version. Furthermore, creating instructions for how to use Word to do this kind of activity is time consuming and taxing. We d like to see Bb create an even better environment for peer review in the future, one that does not rely on the use of word-processing software for these kinds of activities. 3. When uploading large files, students have no way of knowing how much space they have left in their personal quota. For example, this spring, during a project that combined images and words, several class members ran out of server space and had to send me, their teacher an emergency asking to clear their group pages of old files. Perhaps a feature could be created in Tools to enable students to check their server space. 4. I d like to see easier access to review spaces without having to go through so many clicks to get to where you need to go. Research shows that user interface design influences the kinds of work that users are able to on a website and the level of enthusiasm with which they do that work. Bb s creators would do well in this respect by taking a page from such open source software packages as Drupal. As Pavel points out, too many clicks can influence a user s enthusiasm for using an interface. Teachers have plenty to do without having to write extensive instructions outlining all of those clicks. I know I could find better ways to spend my time than writing the extensive instructions for conducting peer review that I have to prepare now. The practices of peer review and peer response are gaining wide interest across the curriculum. To meet the needs of more and more instructors from across the disciplines, Bb would be wise consulting with writing specialists in the area of peer review to create a virtual space for these activities, one that is easy to access, flexible in use, and user friendly to cut down on the number of clicks. Final Thoughts on Conducting Successful Peer Review When organizing and facilitating online peer review sessions using Bb, writing teachers should use the same fundamental principles of peer response that they use in other, offline classroom situations. These principles include

11 11 1. Discussing, at length, with students the goals, objectives, and methods of peer response; 2. Giving detailed and precise instructions to students without overtaking their review spaces and review processes; 3. Being present during the workshop, giving the students confidence that the teacher is there to help. 4. At the end of the peer review session, raising any outstanding concerns and questions with the students, praising them for their successes and outlining directions for improvement. 5. Holding students and themselves to standards, policies, and procedures announced before the workshop. Conclusion: Achieving Overall Goals with Peer Review in Bb By organizing and facilitating online peer review in courses across the disciplines, instructors will be amazed at the improvements they will see in their students writing. Students, who become acclimated to the discourse of a particular discipline, will feel much more comfortable engaging in activities that require reading, writing, and discussion in the classroom. Peer review directly and critically engages students in the use of a discipline s discourse. Instead of receiving the awkward, unreadable prose insecure students produce at the end of the semester, instructors will find papers that actually make them want to read on. I often hear teachers in other disciplines say that they don t teach writing they aren t the experts. They say they don t count off for the English mistakes, but only the mistakes in the content of the paper, instead. This kind of comment is confusing, because I don t see how we can separate the way a paper is written from its content. To be a member of a discourse community, students need to understand and master to a large extent the way people in a field engage with each other, both through their language and language use. Anyone who assigns writing and I hope everyone does is a writing instructor. We each teach the discourse of our disciplines, not just their contents. We cannot escape doing so. What we can do to make the task more effective and enjoyable is to invite our students into the discourse community and help them practice using its language, first in the low-stakes writing and speaking assignments that involve peer review, among other things, and later in the more demanding assignments that carry higher-stakes, at the conclusion of the semester. Waiting until the end of the semester to assign writing activities is too late. We invite you to employ writing and peer review activities early in the semester to help your students achieve the comfort level necessary for using the discourse of your discipline to improve both their writing and their learning.