Learning from peers
I teach academic writing, and one of the foundational pillars of my first-year seminar peer review. Weekly, students are reading each others’ drafts, commenting on them, and creating revising plans. Students resist thist at first; most of them have had bad-to-neutral experiences with peer review in other classes, and they will say “but you’re the expert! You do the grading! I just want your feedback.” But I need them to understand that givers gain, that learning to give peer feedback is a useful life skill and a useful writing skill, and it’s the core way of learning in our course. Partly, I teach this new understanding through practice; partly, I teach it by reminding them that they often look to their peers to learn how to do good plays on the sports field, or how to jam in a band, or how to hold themselves in social spaces. Looking at peers is inspiring and helpful, because we see realistic examples of the behavior we want to emulate–peers don’t need to be perfect, they simply need to be authentically doing the task. By looking at each others’ work, and talking about it, we learn what makes the work productive.
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