The Power of Peer Workshopping

Another shift for me this year: creating WAY more time and space for peer workshops of formal writing

Students workshopping their writing with peers is a good thing.

I’ve known and believed as much since the beginning of my teaching career. However, up until this year, I didn’t create much time and space for it in our classroom community.

Why not? Well, there’s a litany of reasons, but here are the most frequent I’ve heard and very much struggled with myself:

• “Students don’t often give very good feedback.”

• “What about the students who aren’t finished yet?”

• “Students are nervous to share their own writing with peers.”

• “How do you deal with absences and make-ups?”

• “It just makes the writing process take that much longer.”

Me responding to my former teacher self: Well, yes. And good point. And fair consideration. And yes, that takes a good system and, yes, we only have so much time.

Acknowledging all of that, though, students workshopping their writing with peers is a good thing.

Also, it is an important thing—which is why I’m realizing that I need to create space for this despite all the very-real obstacles listed above.

In the rest of this post, I share the four main reasons for this new priority for me along with numerous samples of what these workshops end up looking like as far as student samples.

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Reason #1: Elevating the Value of Student Writing

Like many high school English teachers, we spend a significant amount of time supporting students in their close-reading skills of complex texts. A large part of this has to do with the tool belt students need for that type of analytical thinking, but such practices also provide an implicit message: these texts have value worth exploring.

So what better move than to turn those close-reading skills onto student writing and, in the process, affirming how much their own writing matters?

This is where the #TQE system that we have embedded throughout our classroom community as analytical readers can seamlessly transition to peer workshops, as students read through with a “thoughts”/“questions” mindset—and then list as they go.

This also helps elevate the feedback from the “peer workshop trapdoor” of only focusing on grammar and easy-to-point-to miscues. Something I realized in reflecting on this latest set of feedback reflections is that the quality elevated a lot in what students offered each other once they were told not to offer anything about language/grammar.

And that of course translated into how students received the feedback from peers, too:

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Reason #2: Feedback Giving/Receiving Growth for S’s

Something I also am very open about with students, especially juniors/seniors on the brink of ending their K-12 experience: a lot of them need to improve in a major way in either giving feedback and/or receiving feedback.

A very common pre-question in these activities, then, is for students to reflect and then share with their groups beforehand about whether giving or receiving feedback is harder for them—and why they believe they feel this way.

Here are our three norms for feedback in order to push students towards growth in this area:

• Feedback should be precise, not general (or else it’s not helpful!)

• Feedback should be constructive, not destructive (or else it does more harm than good)

• Feedback should be affirming, when possible (if you can’t celebrate meaningfully, too, that’s a big gap!)

This also means that our feedback protocol shifts from what you can see above—constructive written “epiphanies” for each other while reading silently—to verbal share-alouds in which the person receiving feedback has to listen first without interjecting before responding. (You can see so many students struggling not to jump in and explain/clarify—but that struggle itself has value, I’d argue!)

Ultimately, this protocol offers the skill of how to receive feedback in an intentional way that values those providing it, too, which is often even more of a skill gap for students than the giving of feedback itself.

Bottom-line, though: peer writing workshops make students better writers, but they also offer opportunities for so many skills beyond writing, too.

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Reason #3: A Better, More-Authentic Accountability

Having made this shift in recent years towards more peer writing workshops, I’ve also realized how much of a motivation this is for students to work ahead on their timeline to get their drafts into a “workshoppable” place and, as a result, to be in a much better place ultimately when they get to the finish line of the writing process.

In an online discourse that frequently talks about late penalties and accountability (*raises hand sheepishly*), I have come to love how students are more authentically motivated by being accountable to each other: they know that they are expected to show up at a certain point in the writing process in order to participate fully (and then, in the rare cases they aren’t ready, it becomes a good conversation between me and them while the workshop is taking place about what happened and how we can do better the next time around).

Finally, by placing workshops this year before the final draft turn-in, this also extends grace as well as purpose to students.

• Grace in that they are reading each other’s drafts and that there is a collective norm of work still needing to be done (as opposed to the anxiety that comes with someone reading your final submission)

• Purpose in that with the final submission still ahead, this workshop can help the writing improve meaningfully still (as opposed to reading each other’s writing after the score is finalized)

My favorite part, then, was reading each student’s feedback epiphany and seeing, quite often, that both grace and purpose were very much present:

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Reason #4: A Reaffirmation of Classroom Culture

Finally, one thing I reflect on a lot is how a classroom culture should evolve over a school year—and how part of that evolution comes from asking more of the community of students as we move into the latter half of the year.

Including in the trust they place in each other.

So allow me to return to how we begin this workshopping process: We are incredibly intentional in our classroom community about asking students to take their core values and using them as a lens not only to reflect on their own actions, but also to advocate for themselves and their needs to those around them.

Using the slide pictured above, students write down a classroom value to focus on in the workshop and why it matters to them and then share that choice and reasoning with their group members.

Yes, whole-class norms matter—but not as much, I’d argue, as individuals expressing their own norms and priorities to the other individuals they will be working with.

And reading the results at the back-end, this norming on the front-end was unquestionably worth it:

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Peer Workshops are Challenging but Worth It

In summary, my conviction around peer writing workshops—especially those before the final submission of the writing is made—centers around these four reasons:

1. emphasizing the value of student writing

2. offering a chance for students to grow important feedback skills

3. bringing in a better, more-authentic accountability

4. reaffirming the classroom community and culture we’ve built

Still, none of this is easy—including how to navigate tricky things like absences (I have a system, though! if you’re curious, just email and I’ll share more) and students arriving unprepared.

Nothing is perfect, but some things are important and worth it—and I’d argue that norming the workshopping of peer writing in our classrooms more often certainly qualifies.

As always, though, feel free to offer your own experiences bringing peer feedback into your classrooms—and of course don’t hesitate to subscribe and share, if you want!

Have a great week, too!
—Marcus