Wednesday, March 31, 2010

On peer editing...

Just wondering if anyone would be interested in doing a bit of peer editing within our class. I'm not sure when the trend started in other parts of the country, but I can't recall ever having done any peer editing. (I graduated from high school in 1989.)

We have two more reflective papers to do, so what do you think? The upcoming due dates are April 6 and April 20. Since Cindy probably can't change the course requirements officially, perhaps we could just do this on our own--even via e-mail.

As Bobbi mentioned, some of our content may be somewhat personal since these are our reflection papers. Certainly, we could leave out a few details in the "rough draft" if necessary.

I think it would be helpful to let us know how our students may feel when asked to do peer editing. Any thoughts on this?

4 comments:

  1. Since in my own educational experience and ESL learning, I never came across peer editing so I never used it as an instructor in my class. The very first time, I came to know about it was, during the TESL course in M.A linguistics back home, but even then the preception I had about peer editing was that of a casual or random activity, where any other learner sitting next could take a look and may even take this opportunity to play a "model teacher" and fill peer's paper with crosses and other negative symbols.
    But this reading on peer editing has given me a new aspect, first, in this paper peer editing is not recomended as a rendom activity, rather it is suggested as an exercise which should be an integral part of the learning, in long term, long term in a sense that each and every step is planned ahead of time for example, when is the right time, usually in practice it is observed that peer editing is done when students have written the draft,but in this paper it is advised to start the peer interaction right from the very first step which is topic discussion, this way learners may get a lot of positive feed back and this process will also develop confidence among the learners, when they go through each step of drafting with the confidence of thier partner, the ultimate benefit of this process would be that at the time of peer editing, peers would avoid any kind of negative approach. Warm up interviews are also suggested to establish peer trust and for learner's and teacher's facility there are different modes oral, written or electronic. Teacher's involvment is an essential part of this kind of peer editing in providing learners with language strategies, modeling the peer response process.
    Another good thing that i foud is the way peer editing is suggested, it involves focus on all the four skills, reading,writing, listening and speaking as it involves interviews and discussions, reading and ofcourse listening to the draft.the only draw back I feel about this deep rooted editing is that it may not develop confidence in a learner when he has to draft something on his own as he may get used to peer's involvement in each step.

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  2. Great suggestion!! How about we practice editing each other's blog articles so that everybody can see the peer responses??

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  3. Well, I for one have experienced peer editing in junior high and high school, and I didn't enjoy it. Usually the comments from fellow students were unhelpful or completely wrong. I didn't (and still don't) mind editing someone else's paper, but over the years I have grown fond of self-editing only (something I guess I'd better grow out of!)

    That being said, the students who peer-edited my papers were not really trained to do so. We just all learned the markings for grammatical editing and applied them. Most of the time comments were not approved of, especially because...well, it was high school. I think if a teacher specifically trained students on how to effectively peer edit, it might be a useful exercise.

    Unfortunately, teachers curriculum are all too often mandated by The Powers That Be, and they are usually on a tight schedule. Which means that the average teacher isn't going to have the class time to devote to making students effective peer editors.

    If you have time, I'd say go for it! And in response to Clint's query, if someone wants to be edited, I'm game, but I don't think I'll be submitting my writing for perusal...at least, not yet :)

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  4. I feel like a key conclusion of our talks in class has been that if we are going to have our students peer edit we need to train them. So, maybe we could all write some guidelines that we would want to use for our peer-editing experiment like we would if we were going to train our students. We could also choose or create a rubric to use together.

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