Fourth Class

I really got a lot out of today's reading (Bean Ch13) b/c it focused on strategies for breaking up the writing process and how to handle the grading (or not grading!). This was something that was alluded to in earlier readings and earlier class discussion--the idea of not grading everything. One of my objectives in taking this class was to explore how to go from writing six formal lab reports in seven weeks to creating better assignments to actually teach some writing but still be able to manage grading. This chapter was full of ideas. Some that seem so obvious to me now and others that are quite clever. I will absolutely bookmark this chapter and refer to it as I re-design the writing assignments for the labs I teach.

One particular strategy I am most interested in exploring is the peer review. This is actually the topic I am doing my annotated bibliography and review on. I found five papers on the topic, three which actually discuss the use of peer review in biology writing. I'm looking forward to reviewing these articles and hope they will actually provide some evidence and guidance for using peer review to help 'coach' the writing process, using Bean's term. The articles I found talk about using a formal peer review process that models the real life peer review process for professional journals. I like this idea as a way of introducing students to peer review and as a way to work in revision without the instructor actually collecting and grading drafts.

Back to Bean, I like even the idea of a simple peer review strategies like paired sharing and paired interviews. Spending time in class exchanging ideas, drafts, outlines--whatever can be time well spent. I experienced this first hand in this class and I truly believe it can be time well spent. I like the idea of the instructor as facilitator--maybe giving a few simple instructions on commenting and walking around the room to check in with pairs.

I do see some problems with this approach as some students could be resistant to the idea of having their peers review their work and not the teacher. I know that good students who put a lot of work into their work might feel disappointed by not having the teacher read it. And I know some students may not think highly of their peers and therefore not put much stock in the peer review. But, I think that this can be remedied by the instructor being vigilant about training students on how to comment and by walking around and being active in class. I also like the idea of out of class reviews where pairs could take home each other's draft and a rubric have to return to class with the rubric filled out.