"Where's the Writer" TETYC March 2014 - 43 views
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“Responders Are Taught, Not Born”
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We contend that student writers will see greater value in peer response if they develop tools that allow them to participate more actively in the feedback process. With teaching suggestions like those above, writers can learn how to re-flect on their experiences with peer response. They can also learn to identify their needs as writers and how to ask questions that will solicit the feedback they need.
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We like to limit each mock session to no more than seven minutes of back and forth between respondent and writer.
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class suggests that the writer’s question
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This becomes a teachable moment. When the respondent asks for assistance from the class, this break in the session becomes an opportunity for the class to assist the writer and the respondent. The writer appears stuck, not knowing what to ask. And the respondent appears perplexed, too.
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we follow Carl Anderson’s suggestion to teach students how to ask questions about their writing through role-playing.
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dynamic list that students freely update throughout the semester on the class classro
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organize the questions within categories such as tone, content, evidence-based support, style, and logistics
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The end result is a robust list of questions for writers to ask of their respondents.
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in-class discussion about effective and less effective questions for writers
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raft three to five questions they have about the assignment to ask of their peers as they prepare to write or revise their assignment. When appropriate, we can direct our students to the course text, where there are
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: pointing, summarizing, and reflecting
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Students’ comments often point to their struggle to position themselves in peer response.
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“What would it take for you to be in-vested as writers in peer response?” Students’ typical responses include the following:>“I need to know what to ask.” >“I don’t know what to ask about my writing, except for things like punctua-tion and grammar.”>“Does the person reading my work really know what the assignment is? Bet-ter than I do?”>“I’m not really sure if I’m supposed to talk or ask questions when someone is giving me feedback about my work, so I don’t really do anything. They write stuff on my paper. Sometimes I read it if I can, but I don’t really know what to do with it.”
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it is important to offer activities to ensure that both respondents and writers are able to articulate a clear purpose of what they are trying to accomplish. These activities, guided by the pedagogies used to prepare writing center consultants
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devote more attention to the respondent than to the writer, we may unwit-tingly be encouraging writers to be bystanders, rather than active participants, in the response process.
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, “Feedback: What Works for You and How Do You Get It?”
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highlight the value of both giving and getting feedback:In 56 pages near the end of this book, we’ve explained all the good methods we know for getting feedback from classmates on your writing. . . . The ability to give responses to your classmates’ writing and to get their responses to your own writing may be the most important thing you learn from this book. (B
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we question whether textbooks provide emergent writers with enough tools or explicit models to engage actively in peer response conversations.
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While such questions are helpful to emerging writers, who depend on modeling, they lack explanation about what makes them “helpful” questions. As a result, emerging writers may perceive them as a prescriptive set of questions that must be answered (or worse, a set of questions to be “given over” to a respondent), rather than what they are intended to be: questions that could advance the writer’s thoughts and agenda.
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this information is limited to the instructor’s manual
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llustrates the difference be-tween vague and helpful questions, pointing out that helpful questions
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You will need to train students to ask good questions, which will help reviewers target their attention.Questions like “How can I make this draft better?” “What grade do you think this will get?” and “What did you think?” are not helpful, as they are vague and don’t reflect anything about the writer’s own thoughts. Questions like “Am I getting off topic in the introduction when I talk about walking my sister to the corner on her first day of school?” or “Does my tone on page 3 seem harsh? I’m trying to be fair to the people who disagree with the decision I’m describing” help readers understand the writer’s purpose and will set up good conversations. (Harrington 14, emphasis added
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uestions” when soliciting feedback (like the advice we found in many textbooks), she also provides explicit examples for doing so
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he most explicit advice for writers about ask-ing questions and, in effect, setting up good conversations is buried in an instruc-tor’s manual for The Allyn & Bacon Guide to Writing. In thi
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“Getting Response” chapter later in the book, they will benefit from the textbook authors’ instructions that they should in fact use questions that will help them solicit their feedback
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dependent on what parts of the textbook they choose to read
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point writers to a specific set of questions that they should ask of their respondents. Such instructions take a notable step toward shifting the locus of control from the respondent to helping writers engage their peers in conversation.
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there is no mention that writers might use them for purposes of soliciting feedback.
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we see an opportunity for modeling that is not fully realized.
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we argue that Faigley offers respondents specific examples that empower them to actively engage the process and give feedback. We contend that emergent writers need a similar level of instruction if they are to be agents in response.
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textbook authors offer few examples for how to get specific feedback
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Peter Elbow and Pat Belanoff ’s first edition of A Community of Writers published in 1995, in which eleven “Sharing and Responding” techniques, d
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we worked to understand how textbooks highlight the writer’s role in peer response.
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We wanted to know what books tell writers about asking questions
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lthough we do not discount the importance of teaching respondents how to give feedback, we argue that writers must also be taught how to request the feedback they desire.
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Writer's role in soliciting feedback during peer edit. Suggestions for modeling and training.
