Workshopping

As a student, I hated group work of any kind, but I especially disliked "workshopping." It was just a fancy term for peer editing, which never worked. I would usually end up exchanging papers with someone who, for whatever reason, had a shaky grasp of the English language. Depending on how seriously they took the task, they either incorrectly corrected my spelling and grammar or simply wrote, "Great work!" on the top of the paper.

As a teacher, I see the problem was that none of us really knew what we were looking for in each other's papers. In an effort to correct this situation, I have totally abandoned peer editing. It's worked well in that none of the students have the opportunity to give their classmates useless feedback, but of course it doesn't help anyone understand what constitutes a "good" paper and, it turns out, knowing how to recognize one goes a long way towards being able to write a good one, too.

So, yeah, I like Lindeman's whole concept of little groups of five kids learning how to give each other constructive criticism. It would be awesome to spend a whole year getting them to be insightful editors of each other's work. But my smallest class has 42 students in it and my room is so small that I can't move the chairs so that groups can sit together.

I recently found a pretty awesome workaround for the whole too many people/too little space thing. I borrowed a document camera and a projector from my ELD department and used it to run whole-class workshops on my students' most recent essays. I had a different focus for each day that we workshopped: constructing paragraphs, particularly the introduction; the difference between summary and commentary; and MLA formatting. I gave students who felt their essays needed attention a chance to voluntarily contribute their writing to the workshop and also handpicked a couple examples that illustrated something I wanted to say about that day's focus. I put post-its over the names, tossed them on the ELMO, and went to work, asking the kids to revise their own essays as I revised the ones on the board. I read things out loud, I asked the students if they understood, I solicited ideas about how to make each essay clearer, I crossed stuff out and added stuff in, and I said out loud the thoughts I would normally think when grading student work. The students were enthusiastic about the process and went home with tons of their own edits on their drafts. I think the process was valuable, although I didn't notice that it resulted in significantly better papers than usual. Maybe next time?