Scaffolding Methods for TeachingPeer Review as Genre

Marianne TomasicJohns Hopkins University

Peer Response and Writing Centers: Theories and PracticesAnna Habib

August 16, 2020

Introduction

I stood outside Mr. Duda’s ninth grade English classroom, he handed me the book he

expected me to read over spring break, Siddhartha by Herman Hesse. He told me there are clues

everywhere in the book and I need to be aware of them to understand it. He also suggested I

write the clues down. Earlier that school year we read Charles Dickens Great Expectations. One

of our requirements was to write at least five hundred dualities in our notebook. We were

instructed to look ofr any word or phrase that had two meanings, two parts, two ideas, etc and

write the words or phrases or sentences word for word with quotation marks and the page

number we found it on. There was no paper writing assignment attached to the activity, but we

did discuss the dualities in the classroom, and he did grade the assignment. This was the day

before objectives and standards were written on the board and students needed to write them in

their notebooks. This was a time of more teacher-directed learning. It was also a time when we

weren’t required to write a full research paper using Chicago Style until our twelfth-grade year

and the unit was a full nine-weeks. What my teachers did was scaffold researching techniques

instead of expecting the common core research writing standard to be taught in a week.

Lately, I have been thinking about the idea of scaffolding, teacher-directed learning, and

student-centered learning. Student centered learning is all the rage, but I question what we are

doing, I can’t help feeling we expect students to know what to do before being taught. That is

when I realized why my peer review assignments in my classroom never worked well: I never

taught the students how to do it, I just expected them to know how to do it. I theorize that

beginning peer review as a student-centered learning will not foster successful student

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participation in peer response, but given a gradual release via scaffolding techniques, students

will be successful.

Scaffolding

The reason behind scaffolding has always been to meet the students where they are and

guide them to where they need to be. One of the constructs coined by Vygotsky is the Zone of

Proximal Development. This is well known in the relationship of reading and Lexile levels. The

idea is that we figure out where the students are in measures of frustration, instruction, and

independent. Once we find their instructional sweet spot, and guide them to an independent spot,

we push the students to another level of an instructional spot and continue the process. The Zone

of Proximal Development ties in with a scaffolding approach to teaching. “Scaffolding consists

essentially of the adult controlling those elements of the task that are initially beyond the

learner’s capacity, thus permitting [the learner] to concentrate upon and complete only those

elements that are within [the learner’s] range of competence.” (Nordlof, 2014). Keeping

scaffolding techniques in mind, peer review must be broken down into teachable components.

Overview

This coming fall, I will have two tenth grade courses, two eleventh grade courses, and

two twelfth grade courses. I would like to complete the full range of activities with my twelfth

grade students. In my research, I looked for examples of rough drafts, peer reviews on the drafts,

and the final papers; however, I was unable to find exactly what I needed. Since, I taught

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Advanced Composition to seniors seven years ago and used the text Bedford’s Models for

Writers: Short Essays for Composition, I decided this would be the main text I use for my

scaffolding approach.

The main components to the scaffolding process will include listening techniques and

activities, studying claims and evidence, studying elements of essays through the readings,

discussions, and activities in the Bedford text, reconstructing and deconstructing an essay,

studying a professinal peer review model, and finally peer reviewing their work – first

anonymously and moving to working in groups. These activtis will be spread out over the year

and interspersed in between the regular literature curriculum. I may also plan on doing some of

the activities on a modified scale with my tenth and eleventh grade students.

Activities and Rationales

Part One: Daily Low Stakes Fluency Writing

At the high school setting, students need to listen to teachers and students to glean what

needs to be learned and understood. For this, students need to learn the difference between

hearing and listening, and the best way is through consistent practice. “Good listeners

consciously [use] their existing real world and linguistic knowledge to construct, interpret, and

summarize their understanding as well as making inferences and predictions to understand

listening input.” (Goh & Hu, 2013) For the past twenty years, my students start class with a

journal quote low-stakes fluency writing prompt. The students write the prompt and spend five

minutes reflecting on its meaning and writing what comes to their mind. To begin my

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scaffolding for peer review, I will switch out how I present journal quotes. Instead of viewing the

quotes on the board, they students will have to listen to me and write down what I say. This idea

of listening then writing is often used in English as Foreign Language courses to help EFL

students develop an ear, however it can be used for native speakers for the same reason and

follows the Common Core standard two under Speaking and Listening: Comprehension and

Collaboration: Integrate and evaluate information presented in diverse media and formats,

including visually, quantitatively, and orally. Practicing listening skills through the daily low

stakes writing assignments will prepare students for later stages of the scaffolding assignments:

responding to published essays.

Activity One:

Daily Journal Quote Writing/Start of the Day - Low Stakes Fluency Writing

The quote can be a sentence from a book, a famous quote, a lyric, or the student can choose a line from a full poem or full song that is read or played for them.

The Students Will:

Students will listen to the quote, write it down, and then respond to it. This will be a daily activity that is just five minutes in the beginning of class. They can choose to write about the quote or whatever comes to their mind.

How It Helps:

In Peer Review and Peer Response in a class group setting, it is important that students learn to listen instead of just hearing, this daily activity will train the students to listen and respond.

Example 1:

During this class the students listened and watched Bob Dylan perform “Mr. Tambourine Man.” They had to choose one line from the song. This student chose the lines, “My senses have been stripped/My hands can't feel to grip”His response sentence: “What if I’m in a coma, but still in the womb, would music wake me up?” (R.H- grade 8)

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Example 2:

In the same class as above with the same song, another student chose the line, “And take me disappearing through the smoke rings of my mind.” She wrote fast paced almost half a page. This is her last sentence: “I take the yelling and stay silent like a goat.” (J.A - grade 8).

Part Two: Claims and Evidence

During the past year, I discovered that students still had a difficult time understanding

claims and evidence. Since writing a good paper requires this innate understanding, the students

need practice identifying claims and evidence. I will take time in class to project the claims and

evidence unit from the online program NoRedInk on the smartboard. As a class we can go over

examples and discuss what makes each one a claim and why examples are or are not evidence.

Then for homework, the students will have to complete a round of questions on NoRedInk. As

they gain skills, the students become more motivated to work. “Students are likely to be

intrinsically motivated to improve as writers when they attribute their potential for improving a

draft (and future drafts) as something they can control and believe in their abilities to make

revisions.” (Mackiewicz & Thompson, 2013). Though improving their ability to understand

claims and evidence might not seem like a writing revision process, it is because students can

reflect back on writing assignments they have done and go back to make changes for a better

grade.

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Activity Two:

I will use NoRedInk(www.noredink.com)an online adaptive program that helps teach writing, grammar, and mechanics. I will use their assignment maker and broadcast on the whiteboard the tutorials and examples that we will walk through an discuss.

The Students Will:

Once the students have had the modeling lessons in class, I will assign activities on weak and strong claims and weak and strong evidence and then embedding evidence for literary analysis and nonfiction. These assignments will be in short sections over a long time period.

How It Helps:

Because the program is adaptive and will give lessons when students get an answer wrong, it is a low stakes practice that helps students understand various examples of weak and strong and why the strong ones work. This can then be translated into their writing and in understanding the claims and evidence in professional and their peers writing.

Example 1:

Questions with weak and strong claims.

Example 2:

If a student gets an answer wrong, the program restates the definition with more examples.

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Example 3:

Before the student begins a new practice session, the program uses a line by line video to explain the requirements. In this screenshot of a finished video, it is about evidence.

Part Three: Practicing critical listening, focused reading, and identifying areas for growth

Using Bedford’s Models for Writers and Harkness Discussions

This part of the scaffolding activity will take place over half of the year and will be in

tangent with the NoRedInk activities and the regular literature curriculum. I will see my students

for seventy-five minutes every other day: this schedule is less than a block of ninety-minute

classes every day per semester or every other day and also shorter than if I had the students every

day for 45- minutes. As a result, I will have to use my time wisely to fit the required literature in

with the added peer review scaffolded activities.

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I will use Bedford’s Models for Writers. Each essay begins with a short biography of the

writer and then a Reflecting on What You Know assignment. I will begin by orally reading the

Reflecting on What you know questions, then as a class we will brainstorm answers. An

example of one of the questions is, “How concerned are you about climate changes or global

warming? What, if anything, do you think needs to be done?” (Rosa, 2012). I can create a chart

of the answers on the white board or the smartboard. I will then read the essay to the students –

they will have to listen very carefully.

After I read the essay out loud, I will then orally present the critical thinking question

about the reading. They will have to write their answer down in their notebook. This listening is

critical as it scaffolds critical listening skills to be able to respond to their peers once they are

placed in group discussion settings. As I have discovered in the past, just because students have

experience working in groups and collaborative settings, it doesn’t mean they listen to one

another.

The next part of the assignment will be grouping the students up and giving them each a

copy of the essay that they can annotate. The students will each read the questions for study and

discussion, then read the essay to themselves. Once the students in the group finish reading the

essay, they will have time to work together to answer the Questions for Study and Discussion.

Once each group has had time to reflect on the essay and the questions, the entire class will

regroup for a Harkness discussion – A variant of a socratic seminar.

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Activity Three:

Reading, annotating, andcritiquing professional and student essays. The students will use a variety of techniques using Bedford’s Models for Writers, eleventh edition.

The Students Will:

Students will complete a variety of lessons which include:

1. Listening2. Brainstorming3. Reflective Writing4. Previewing5. Silent Reading6. Group discussion7. Full Class Harkness 8. Critiquing Student

Model for areas in need of improvement

How It Helps:

Students will continue their skills in listening and critiquing writing. They will also learn to annotate evidence in a professional model, and then discuss their evaluations with the entire class through a Harkness discussion. In each reading they will learn about a writing technique and apply it to correcting a student model. This allows the students to comprehend writing techniques and critique writings to help improve them before working on their classmates’ writing.

Example 1:Part One of the text. This section will be used to introduce techniques used

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Example 2:Part Two readings: Elements of the Essay.Thesis, Unity, Organization, Beginnings and Endings, Paragraphs, Transitions, Effective Sentences

Example 3:Part Three readings: The Language of the Essay.Diction and Tone and Figurative Language

Models for Writers is broken down into several parts to understand essays. The first

section is The Elements of Essay which includes essays that focus on Thesis, Unity,

Organization, Beginnings and Endings, paragraphs, Transitions, Effective Sentences, and

Writing with Sources. In this section after each professional model, the book includes a student

model that needs improvements in the specific focus.

An example of one of the assignments for unity section is, “Carefully read the following

five-paragraph sequence, paying special attention to how each paragraph relates to the writer’s

thesis. Identify the paragraph that disrupts the unity of the sequence and explain why it doesn’t

belong.” (Rosa, 2012). When the students take time to complete the assignment for the student

model, they are practicing peer review in steps. “Another finding for the failures of peer-review

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is that some students gave overly critical comments or complimentary feedback since they were

reluctant to criticize their peers. To make students more effective reviewers and thus enhance

the effectiveness of peer review on student writing, some researchers have suggested training be

crucial with empirical evidence.” (Liou & Peng, 2009) The Bedford assignments gives students

time to scaffold specific concepts in writing by only focusing on one at a time. They also get a

chance to practice without the fear of being overly critical or under critical of a classmates

writing.

By the time students complete reviewing the professional and student models in the

Bedford text, they will have had good experience listening, thinking aloud, and critiquing.

“Using think alouds to teach reading comprehension and then the read-aloud protocol technique

(which is based on think-alouds) for peer-review has two major benefits for students: because

students practicing thinking aloud with published texts before they do so with each other’s texts,

they build the habit of thinking aloud to understand rather than to fix.” (Nelson, 2009). In

scaffolding peer review, Models for Writers essays will not be the only practice texts the students

will study before writing and peer reviewing their classmates work.

Part Four: Introduction to Peer Review Research

At this point in the long form unit, the students will have an opportunity to find research

both peer reviewed and non-peer reviewed. We will work with google and google scholar, along

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with any databases my school has access to use. This is the part of the unit where I can introduce

a full research paper assignment and that way the articles they find can be geared to their paper. I

will introduce some questions that peer reviewers focus on and re iterate the importance of the

sections in the Bedford text. This can also be a good time for the students to generate what

questions should be answered in a peer review.

Activity Four:

What do professional peer reviewers do?

A lesson on the difference between articles and peer-reviewed articles, what a professional peer review looks like, and finding peer reviewed articles.

The Students Will:

1. Use google scholar and regular google search to find articles regarding the same research question.

2. Identify several non- peer reviewed articles and several peer reviewed articles.

3. Read and discuss two reviews of a professional textbook.

How It Helps:

In the classroom, students think of peer review as just finding grammatical errors in classmates’ papers, even though peer reviewers do this, they also make sure claims and the claims’ evidence are correct. Seeing examples of a peer review and non-peer reviewed article can help them see the difference in accurate research and how important it is. The students will also have a chance to two actual peer reviews for a textbook and see how the author incorporated the changes in the final product.

Example 1:Sections of one of the two professional peer reviews completed for Mark Terry’s textbook.

The students will know that these are the reviews after the fifth draft of the textbook.

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Published by Palgrave Macmillan copyright 2020

Example 2:Another section of one of the reviews.

Part Five: Reconstructing and Deconstructing Essays

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Next, in the scaffolding approach to teaching peer review, students will learn to

reconstruct and deconstruct essays. “Teachers can help learners develop greater confidence in

themselves and greater awareness of their learning by getting learners to deconstruct the various

facets of learning to listen. This can be done through teacher explanations and modeling as well

as learner reflections, peer-peer dialogue, and experience with strategy use.” (Goh & Hu, 2013).

Therefore, the next activity in peer review scaffolding would be a group assignment on

reconstructing a published essay. This requires taking a published essay, retyping it in a fashion

that every sentence is able to be cut into the same format. The group of students will have to

read all of the sentences and put the essay back in order. As the teacher comes around to check

on the group’s completed work, the students will have to defend their order. It is possible for the

students to recreate the essay in another order and for it to still make sense. The idea is that it

does make sense and the students can defend the order. Working in a group, requires them to

listen to one another’s ideas.

After the students reconstruct an essay, each student will receive a different essay that

they will deconstruct. They will take out pieces, reorder information, and in an essence take it

from a published draft to a rough draft. Once the students have completed this assignment, as a

class we will review what marked up writing looks like by studying samples from The Writer’s

Digest Writing Clinic: Expert Help for Improving Your Work text. We will then model peer

reviewing a deconstructed essay I created by answering questions about the writing – specifically

focusing on what we studied in the Bedford text and with grammatical features and sentence

structures we practiced throughout the year up to this point. “Peer review is mainly organized in

two forms: Quantitative grading and qualitative review. Quantitative grading refers to students

evaluating peer students’ assignments according to criteria set by the teacher. Qualitative review

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means that students give written comments, suggestions, and feedback on peer students’

assignments.” (Wang, Guo, Le, & Qiao, 2019). the questions I pose focus on the quantitative

grading, but the answers they will give in class as we model will end up being a qualitative

focus.

Activity Five:

Reconstructing and deconstructing an essay.

Using essays that have been cut out sentence by sentence the students will work in a group to reconstruct the essay, then individually they will deconstruct a published essay to have another student peer review.

The Students Will:

1. The students in a group will read all sentences and work together to put the essay back together.

2. Each student will deconstruct a published essay. They will take out pieces, reorder information, change sentence structures.

3. view a model to the class a peer review of a deconstructed essay.

4. Exchange deconstructed models and peer review.

How It Helps:

Students will use what they learned from the Bedford Essays to reconstruct an essay, this will help students transfer knowledge learned into a constructive project while also transferring listening skills they have been practicing.

By deconstructing, they are understanding why certain elements are important, and how taking them out can mess up a paper. It is learning what claims, evidence, and proper structure can do for a paper.

Peer reviewing the deconstructed papers allows students to practice without worrying about being overly critical or too nice.

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Example 1:What Editing looks like: an example from Writer’s Digest Writing Clinic: Expert Help for Improving Your Work

Example 2:Reconstructed and Deconstructed Essays source book.

After the class model, the students will exchange their deconstructed essay with their

peers and practice the peer review process. By practicing with the deconstructed essays, it gives

the students a chance to focus on the assignment rather than the person. This should help when it

comes time to peer review an authentic classmates’ paper.

Finally, the time has arrived to peer review their classmates papers. Throughout this

scaffolded approach, the students have already been writing papers that they would have been

discussing with me, we would have already practiced modeling those papers as a class. This

would have already happened since we are scaffolding peer review as a genre, and it takes time

and is taught in tandem with other activities and units. Since, “the student of writing must learn

to evaluate his own, his peers’, the masters’ writing…. The trick, then, is to find ways to allow

students to evaluate their own work, for after all, they will be on their own when they leave a

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particular classroom.” (Freedman, 1992) The final goal is that by the end of the scaffolded

approach to teaching peer review as a genre, the students are better able to listen to one another,

critique work written by professionals and their classmates, and improve in their assessments of

writing and in their ability to write.

Final Considerations

I began at my school last January, but for two weeks the absentee rate was 70%.

Teachers, administrators, staff, and students came down with an illness that left them sick for

weeks and still not at their best when they came back to school. I was unable to teach those

weeks. Also, I was the fourth teacher the students had this year, as their regular teacher left, and

they had two short term substitutes and some daily subs in the meantime.

I felt as if I were just getting into the swing of the things and getting to know the students

when COVID shut the schools down across the nation. Our remote learning had hiccups. This

fall we will be in the classroom, but students will have to remain six feet apart and wear a mask.

Students who do not want to be in the classroom have the option to stay home but zoom into the

class as it happens in real time. All classrooms will be set up with something called an owl that

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will follow the speaker, so those at home can see that person. However, I am worried about how

difficult it will be to listen when we will all be speaking with our masks on our face.

I can only do the best I can, however, I will be taking meticulous notes and requesting

permission to keep copies of students’ work. I know I will have to adjust on the fly, delete ideas,

add ideas, and hopefully by the end of the school year, this project will give me a better idea for

my thesis.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Burke, J. (2013). The common core companion the standards decoded ; what they say, what they mean, how to teach them. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.

Freedman, S. W. (1992). Outside-in and Inside-out: Peer Response Groups in Two Ninth-Grade Classes. Research in the Teaching of English, 26(1), 71-107.

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Li, M. (2013). Individual novices and collective experts: Collective scaffolding in wiki-based small group writing. System, 41(3), 752-769. doi:10.1016/j.system.2013.07.021

Liou, H., & Peng, Z. (2009). Training effects on computer-mediated peer review. System, 37(3), 514-525. doi:10.1016/j.system.2009.01.005

Mackiewicz, J., & Thompson, I. K. (2013). Motivational Scaffolding, Politeness, and Writing Center Tutoring. The Writing Center Journal, 33(1), 38-73.

Nelson, G. (2009). Approaching Authentic Peer Review. The English Journal, 98(5), 81-87.

Nordlof, J. (2014). Vygotsky, Scaffolding, and the Role of Theory in Writing Center Work. The Writing Center Journal, 34(1), 45-64.

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Simmons, J. (2003). Responders are Taught, Not Born. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 46(8), 684-693.

Wang, M., Guo, W., Le, H., & Qiao, B. (2019). Reply to which post? An analysis of peer reviews in a high school SPOC. Interactive Learning Environments, 28(5), 574-585. doi:10.1080/10494820.2019.1696840

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