The Value of Written Peer Criticism

When I talk to graduate students and colleagues about their use of collaborative learning, I often hear stories about when it doesn't work. No one's version of collaborative pedagogy is universally rewarding, of course, but I have found some approaches consistently more successful than others. Often, peer criticism consists of oral or hastily written comments by students in a classroom group; sometimes students fill out a checklist or a form that resembles a short-answer test (for example Huff and Kline 122-23). In these cases, neither teacher nor student is taking peer criticism seriously as a writing exercise. Furthermore, much oral or checklist peer criticism is limited to students' evaluations of their peers' writing techniques, thus neglecting discussion of the substantive issues in the paper. Finally, much peer criticism focuses either on the subjective experience of the critic, such as Peter Elbow's "movies of people's minds while they read your words" (Writing without Teachers 77), or objectified standard criteria, such as his "criterion-based feedback" (Writing with Power 240-45). 1 would like to propose a melding of exercises from Peter Elbow and Pat Belanoff's book Sharing and Responding with the series of written peer critiques Kenneth Bruffee describes in his text A Short Course in Writing. These two kinds of peer criticism work best in tandem in the collaborative classroom because together they capture the struggle between individual expression and social constraint that most of us experience as writers. Sharing and Responding can function on its own or as a companion piece to Elbow and Belanoff's A Community of Writers (second edition forthcoming), with which it was published. The exercises continue the tradition of readerbased responding that Elbow began in Writing without Teachers and Writing with Power, but with a twist. The exercises in Sharing and Responding have a more developed social framework than their earlier manifestations. Although the emphasis is still on the writer's making individual choices, the structure of group interaction is more clearly developed than in Elbow's earlier work. For instance, each exercise has sample reader responses followed by a section called "What a Writer Might Think about This Feedback." These exercises (as well as other subjective or commentbased—rather than essay-length—peer criticism)