From the Teaching Diaries: Medieval Peer Response

http://www.exploring-castles.com/medieval_castle_layout.html

Peer review is one of the most necessary activities in the writing classroom, and yet it's somehow one of the most boring for students and the most logistically annoying for teachers. For whatever reason  - they don't trust their judgment, they don't want to destroy their classmate's soul, they enjoy reading a student's paper just as much as I enjoy portfolio assessment - they resist it to the point of not doing it. It's not enough to tell them how peer response is really about the student reader, about getting them to reflect on their own writing choices using their peer's work as a lens, that they help themselves by helping someone else revise. You don't want to script their response too much, but you also have to give them something to look for and comment on. No matter what, they despise the activity, and I despise cramming it down their throats.

I actually don't hate commenting on student essays. It's a lot of work, especially when you're doing up to a hundred of the suckers. But I get a charge out of finding those moments where the student actually teaches me something, where I'm compelled to go hmmmmm... I just wish, at peer response time, that the students felt the same way. Instead, they hesitate to do more than correct grammatical errors and write things like "I agree" or :) or :0 or ;).

Since I participated in a forum at UWM on this topic, I've continued to try different approaches to peer review. I'd like to present my latest inventions here. The idea is to get them to make genuine, productive responses to the peer's work which helps them identify what's valuable in writing. The trick is to make them enjoy the activity enough to participate fully and generate new ideas, not just fix errors. I've determined that it's okay to give them something to look for, but it's more effective to conceptualize that target in an engaging way for young writers.

I bring you the Castle Layout Peer Response activity. In this, student identify the different areas of a typical medieval castle, such as the great hall, the towers, the moat, the courtyard, based on the actual functions of those parts. The gatehouse, is the statement or articulation of controlling purpose (thesis). Areas of great importance and centrality such as the Hall and the Inner Courtyard represent important areas of critical inquiry which should be the basis of a good essay. Fringe areas like the towers, and the Outer Courtyard represent avenues of expansion, or possible yet-to-be-made connections. Defense areas like the Barbican and the Moat, represent trouble spots. The idea being that you want to treat your readers like a welcome guest and not an attacker, and you want to appeal to visitors from the outside as well.

Once the student identifies all the parts, she can now construct a castle based on where these elements lie in the paper. The intro, which may contain the gatehouse, will be at the front perhaps. That is, the beginning of the paper is where the reader enters, and they travel from paragraph to paragraph as one would travel to the far end of the castle. This then gives them a spatial sense of the paper's organization...and appeals to the artsy students. My student Joe Robinson can take the credit for this idea.

My student Becca Naughton came up with another. This I call the Triwizard Tournament Peer Response activity. In this case, the "hmmmmm" moment I talk about above is the Dragon Egg, phase one of the tournament from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Once they find the "Egg," they then must find a source that might frame, question, interrogate or otherwise connect to that shining moment. This is the Rescue from the Depths phase...the writer's hesitation being the creepy mermaid keeping that moment's development under the surface. Finally, the student try Negotiating the Labyrinth. They find a way in to that paper for the source, which involves finding possible connections to other places in the essay. (Conveniently, Easter candy is still available at a substantial markdown right now, so I can offer a prize for completion that's very fitting.)

On my own, I came up with the Dominion Dark Ages Peer Response activity. Here the students draw cards from Dominion, a dynamic card game from Rio Grande games. What they do to their peer's paper depends on the role depicted on the card, for example:

Mercenary: Delete two sentences or passages from the essay by crossing them out. You may decide what can go based on your sense of the writer’s purpose, or on your own interest (or lack thereof) in those passages.

Spoils: Circle one passage that’s a real treasure. You enjoyed it, were surprised by it, learned something, etc…

Beggar: Underline something in the paper that tells you something you didn’t know.

And so on and so forth.  This has the potential for students to do many cards, sometimes repeating if it works out that way. There's a lot of opportunity for mass deleting also - crossing out of vast amounts of the essay's text - which leaves them with what might be viewed as the paper's guts. It's very satisfying, as is throwing cards into the "Trash" when you play Dominion:Dark Ages. 

Heck, I've considered giving the students markers and crayons and having them go through and make a humument out of the thing. Feels good to delete.

And now I'm going to go play Dominion with my husband. Dorks of a feather.