Should Teachers Comment on Drafts of Student Essays?
or
Making Time for Peer Review

Michael Kischner

         The question of my title refers to classes in which students share their writing for peer review in small groups. While much of what I have to say applies to composition classes, I have particularly in mind other classes which include significant writing components-classes which fall in a variety of disciplines and which meet writing requirements, for instance, and learning community programs.

         For me, the use of student writing groups came on the heels of changes in my own practices as a writing teacher. Like so many of us in the early eighties, I became much more the coach than the evaluator. My comments became longer and friendlier, and my students were invited either to revise their papers or to apply my elaborately helpful suggestions to subsequent assignments. Writing groups, then emerging as a topic of discussion among writing teachers, fit in nicely with the coaching relationship I was developing with my students. Such groups enlarged this relationship to a whole circle of help and support from a student's peers-for how could there be too much help and support? Thus, while the students clustered to give each other feedback on their writing, I was reading it, too.

         A typical week in which the first draft of an essay was due might proceed as follows. On Tuesday, each student would bring in two copies of the draft. One would be for me, the other would be for sharing with the writing group. This sharing would take place on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday and would follow a set procedure based on principles laid out in Peter Elbow's Writing Without Teachers (see especially chapter four, "The Teacherless Writing Class"). Students would break into groups of no more than five. One student would read his or her first draft. The others were to listen without making any notes. Following the first reading, they could jot down first impressions and other notes. Then the student would read the draft a second time. (Students were required to do this second reading, even though the experience was sometimes excruciating, both for the writer and the audience. The pain was telling them something they needed to hear.) This time the others could write notes as they listened. At the end of the second reading, the listeners took a few minutes to organize their notes and then took turns giving the writer oral responses to the draft. The writer was to listen and take notes but was not to respond to the feedback in any way except to say "Thank you" at the end. When each listener had responded to the draft, the group moved on to the next draft. (Sometimes I had students give each other their written notes and asked that these be appended to the revised draft when it was turned in.)

         In the meantime, I was reviewing and commenting on my copy of each draft. By the time class reconvened as a whole on Friday, I would be ready to return the marked drafts. Thus, by the end of the week, each student had (1) received feedback of varying helpfulness from peers, (2) obtained often excellent insights from reading his or her own paper aloud, and, (3) gotten back my own analysis of the draft's strengths and weaknesses and of how to develop the first and minimize the second. Coming up with this analysis for each first draft by Friday often cost me a sleepless Thursday night and mental exhaustion as I imagined myself into the intentions of each individual and composed suggestions about how these could be better fulfilled. But it was worth it: my analysis clearly pointed to the direction that would be taken by a reader and writer much more experienced than the student and the student's peers-and one who (such are the unfortunate realities of the system) would eventually be grading the student.

         Is it any surprise, then, that I began to sense a certain desultory quality to the exchanges I overheard among the students in their writing groups? Since I was strict about their following the steps in the procedure, each paper did usually receive two full readings aloud, but I soon found myself exhorting students to respond with more than "I really like it-it really flows." I gave them instruction and practice in making "observations" as these are defined by Ponsot and Deen in Beat Not the Poor Desk, still the richest source of good advice for the writing teacher [". . . if it is really an observation, there can't be any disagreement about it" (58); "Observations are descriptions: public and recognizable" (50)]. I gave them forms on which to record specific responses to specific aspects of the writing. I told them they could not wind up their work quickly and leave early.

         These measures had some effect sometimes, but they could not offset the simple fact that the feedback each student draft received from me was almost bound to supersede feedback from the student's peers. True, my comments frequently corroborated something a student had already heard from peers, and this was instructive for the writer, but it also reaffirmed my role as the reigning expert. Students had no objection to my performing this role. Thus, when I announced one quarter that drafts would be revised without benefit of commentary from me, there was much unhappiness. One or two students suggested that helping them through my comments was the primary thing I was being paid to do. A part of me agreed with them. When I wasn't feeling downright guilty, I was feeling-even worse-less loved. But the change in the writing groups was undeniable. The students genuinely needed each other-demanded help from each other. Students who missed class on a writing group day would beg fellow?students to meet with them outside of class. When I walked by the groups, they were not discussing the upcoming Nordstrom's sale.

         And what of their writing? Unfortunately, I did not at the time set up a comparative study. I have only my sense that the revised papers I received were neither much better nor much worse than those I received when I was commenting on their drafts. Shrewd as my comments were, they usually failed to lead student writers to fulfill the potentialities I had divined in their drafts during those strenuous Thursday night reading sessions. For all the coachy friendliness of my suggestions-"Monica: a great start on a discussion of Cain and Abel; perhaps you could extend it to other instances of the theme of divine arbitrariness that runs through Genesis"-the papers remained stubbornly the students' own, circumscribed by their own literary and intellectual reach. My comment had probably done little more than to puzzle the student, frustrate her, or leave her with a sense of failure for being unable to follow where it led. Comments from her peers would not have had this effect.

         This account seems to be leading directly to a clear answer to the question of my title: no, I seem to be concluding, teachers should not comment on students' drafts. They should set up a system through which the students receive helpful feedback from peers who are more likely to offer reactions and suggestions that can guide a student, and the teachers themselves should stay out of the picture until the students have revised their drafts. In my view, this is the preferable method-but (get ready for more italics) only if teachers are willing to devote the necessary class time and effort to setting up a system that provides students with helpful feedback from peers. This is a large "but." It involves, I think, a minimum of five hours of class time for the first paper and three hours for each subsequent paper. Even supposing just two short papers in a course, that amounts to eight hours. Some might balk at devoting such an amount of time to writing matters in a course that has a lot of other subject matter to cover, or in a learning community program with a challenging reading list (and, presumably, more than two short papers). But implementing the system takes time.

         What, then, would such a helpful system include?

         First Hour. A careful introduction to the operation of writing groups. Procedures need to be explained-the mechanics of reading drafts aloud or, if one prefers silent reading, of circulating drafts. More important, students need to be told what helpful feedback is and isn't. This is a big subject, of course, but worth dwelling on because-as I insist to my students-giving truly helpful feedback will contribute to their own improvement as writers. As Peter Elbow observes, it requires that we "learn . . . to read closely and carefully enough to show the student little bits of proto-organization or sort of clarity in what they've already written" ["Ranking, Evaluating, and Liking," (202)]. We need time to talk to them about how to move from initial responses, which are important data, to language that points out the possible source of the response, so that "It seemed kind of choppy" becomes "In this paragraph, each sentence seems to deal with a different topic." (Again, the best advice on this subject is in Ponsot and Deen.) If we supply students with some kind of checklist or form designed to elicit helpful feedback, we need to go through the form.

         Second Hour. Demonstration and practice. There are various ways of demonstrating how a writing group actually works. Two colleagues and I have formed ourselves into a writing group and conducted a session in front of combined classes. I have read a paper of my own to a class and had them respond. I have had a student volunteer read a paper to the whole class and receive feedback while I observed and then made comments; I have also made transparencies of a student paper and projected it for feedback. More important, I have projected examples of written comments on the feedback form I provide. Networked computers open up whole new possibilities. The point is to show students how much care and energy goes into giving helpful feedback. They should conclude that 30 minutes is almost a minimum for the reading (or twice hearing) and responding helpfully to an essay.

         Third and Fourth Hours. Students conduct their writing groups. Four persons to a group, I find, is a good number. It gives a student feedback from three classmates and makes an absence by one less than crippling. By cutting the ideal 30 minutes per paper to 25, you can fit four papers into two 50?minute class hours. If the students have been adequately prepared, they can't do it in less. (It might be possible to cut some class time by having students supply copies of their papers to members of the group and having the members take the papers home to read. It is then important that, upon coming together again, the members of the group listen to oral versions of each other's feedback, since everybody learns from this.)

         Fifth Hour. As they embark on the revision stage, students need to be shown what real revision is-something that involves "substantive changes, not just editing," as Elbow says on one of the evaluation grids he uses (195). This takes at least an hour. If one cannot have all students sitting before networked computers, the next best thing is to have a computer hooked up to a projector in the classroom. Further down the technological ladder, I have worked profitably with transparencies and multi?colored pens. Students should be able to see "before and after" versions which look significantly different from each other.

         Students then have about a week in which to revise their drafts. On the due date, they bring their first drafts and their final drafts, both of which they hand in along with copies of written feedback they received from their peers on "Reader Report" forms (see Appendix I) and a "Writer Report" designed to make them review their own writing and revision process (see Appendix II). Both of these forms are worth the teacher's attention, incidentally. I am continually surprised by how often I find myself writing, "You should have paid attention to Kathy's comment about the imbalance in the amount of space you devote to Macbeth and to Lady Macbeth in your comparison," or "Tim was right: the dog in 'To Build a Fire' is worth mentioning." On the Writer Report form, I am struck by the number of poor essays whose authors write an unapologetic "No" to the question: "Did you discover anything about this work in writing about it that you had not seen before you wrote about it?"

         Only now do I enter the picture as reader and evaluator. There is no denying that-certainly in the students' eyes and consequently in my own-my role as evaluator predominates. If one assigns grades to final drafts of papers, the comments do become "defenses" of the grade. I know this is anathema to many writing teachers, but I have come to accept grading, and justifying grades, as part of my responsibility. It is a part that becomes less painful, I find, the more I put into giving my students in advance what they need to succeed in a writing task: (a) a clearly described assignment, (b) examples of essays that fulfill it well, (c) analyses of those examples, (d) class time for brainstorming topics. (Yes, we are talking here of yet more hours invested in advance of the five outlined above.) People who are loath to make their comments evaluative, claiming that they want to make them instructive instead, should consider whether they shouldn't be doing more instructing before the students write. It embarrassed me to realize one day how much of my "teaching" amounted to assigning students some task with little preparation, having scores of them inevitably fail at it, and then-gently, to be sure, and most helpfully-showing them at length how they could have done it better. The fiction among too many writing teachers for too long has been that students need first to be allowed to stumble untutored through an initial attempt and then helped. Richard Larson, in "Teaching Before we Judge: Planning Assignments in Composition," reminds us that creating an instructive writing assignment-a process to which he argues a good teacher devotes a great deal of time-involves deciding "what you must teach . . . in order to assure students a fair chance to do well on the assignment" (215).

         If I limit myself to commenting evaluatively on final drafts, it may be asked what, if anything, I do directly to promote improvement in my students' writing. Have I completely abandoned the role of coach which I took up in the eighties? I think not. In addition to moving much of the coaching to the very beginning of the writing process, I also make sure that (a) my comments always include advice for next time and (b) there is a next time and a next time: when students are given three opportunities to write roughly the same kind of paper, the third paper, I have found, frequently constitutes a breakthrough. We sometimes deny our students these breakthroughs in our haste to move on to another kind of assignment ("That was the paper analyzing a character; now I want to you do a paper tracing an image"). In Washington state, the system of eleven?week quarters is partly to blame for this. There is much to fit in and so little time.

         Time, of course, is the subject of this article. I don't deny that some of the steps I describe could be speeded up. Perhaps an hour could be shaved off one part or another of the process (and an hour could also easily be added!). The point is that-as nearly every experienced teaching colleague I know seems to be discovering these days-we must learn to slow down for learning. All the discoveries we have made in recent years about progressive pedagogies-collaborative learning, classroom research, student-centered teaching, teaching for different learning styles, writing to learn-how could we hope to bring them into our courses without giving up at least bits of our old syllabi? When we face the fact that, if we are to embrace some of these progressive pedagogies, something will have to go from our reading lists or our lecture time-that is the moment when we will really decide how important those pedagogies are.

         If we decide they are wonderful but not wonderful enough to do right, then the answer to the question in my title is yes, teachers should exhaust themselves and earn lots of love and grey hair by reading student drafts and filling them with comments only a fraction of which the students will be able to use. This will save class time for which, God knows, there are many important uses. On the other hand, if we decide that it is worth devoting a substantial amount of time to helping our students become independent writers and revisers, then the answer is no, and we will be doing them and ourselves a favor.

Appendix I: A Sample Reader Report Form

You need to fill out reader report forms for three papers.

Please make a strenuous intellectual effort to try to get "inside" the paper you are reporting on, to understand what the writer of the paper is trying to do, and to point out to the writer where the paper is succeeding and where it needs improvement. Remember that, in doing so, you are improving you own writing. Please answer a minimum of seven questions. Don't be too nice! Remember, friends don't let friends write sloppily or superficially.

To: ______________________________
(name of writer of paper)

(1) What seems to be the paper's central agenda?

(2) At what point in the paper does this agenda become clear?

(3) What parts or aspects of the paper are most effective in advancing its agenda?

(4) Are there any parts that do not help to advance the paper's central agenda or parts that don't seem to fit in?

(5) Can you identify transitions (often at the beginning of new paragraphs) that especially help you to follow the thread?

(6) Comment on the paper's ending. Does it avoid just re?stating what the paper has said?

(7) Are there any word?choices or sentences you would point to as especially effective- or as needing some improvement?

(8) Does the paper take you sufficiently into the work it discusses, or do you think it needs to do more in this department. (One mark of a paper's getting into a work is its use of quotation and specific reference. Does the paper do enough of this?)

(9) (a) Does the paper correctly employ MLA documentation style?_________________.

(b) If it has a title (it should), is the title helpful?_____________________________.

(10) Is there anything else you would like to comment on? (The writer might like to know if the paper helped you to see something in its subject that you hadn't seen before, or if you were persuaded of the truth or usefulness of its central thesis.)

Appendix II: A Sample Writer Report Form

1. What did you find most difficult about writing this paper?

2. In writing this paper, did you see something in the work you wrote about that you would not have seen if you had not written about it. If so, what?

3. What is your favorite sentence in this essay?

4. List one or more sentences that might benefit from rewriting.

5. What was the most helpful feedback you received from your group?

6. Is there anything you would like to do on this paper if you had more time?

Suggested Reading

Brannon, Lil, Melinda Knight, and Vara Neverow?Turk. Writers Writing. Montclair: Boynton Cook Publishers, 1982. Chapters 7 and 8 show extensive examples of real revision in response to peer and teacher commentary.

Elbow, Peter. "Ranking, Evaluating, and Liking," College English 55 (1993): 187?206. An important recent article. Especially new and thought?provoking is Elbow's argument that-contrary to received wisdom-"the phenomenon of liking is perhaps the most important evaluative response for writers and teachers to think about" (199).

-. Writing Without Teachers. London: Oxford University Press, 1973. Chapter 4 of this classic, "The Teacherless Writing Class," lays out a procedure for the conduct of writing groups, which ideally are teacherless writing classes.

Gere, Anne Ruggles. Writing Groups: History, Theory, and Implications. Carbondale: Southern Illinois U. Press, 1987. As its title implies, this is not especially a how?to book, and much of it deals with writing groups outside of classroom settings. It has an excellent, extensive bibliography.

Hawkins, Thom. Group Inquiry Techniques for Teaching Writing. Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English, 1976. A brief overview of theory and practice.

Koch, Carl, and James M. Brazil. Strategies for Teaching the Composition Process. Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English, 1978. Especially good on the prewriting stage, this book does offer some good practical hints for the postwriting stage, including sample checklists of questions for peers to ask each other about their writing.

Larson, Richard L. "Teaching Before We Judge: Planning Assignments in Composition." The Leaflet 66:1 (1967): 3?15. Rpt. in The Writing Teachers' Sourcebook. Ed. Gary Tate and Edward P.J. Corbett. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981. Shows how much teaching can and should be done in the making of assignments and, especially, in the setting up of assignment sequences.

Ponsot, Marie, and Rosemary Deen. Beat Not the Poor Desk. Montclair: Boynton/Cook, 1982. The essential book for writing teachers. A gold mine of practical wisdom, concrete suggestions, and straightforward writing.

back to the Table of Contents