Peer Assessments

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You will be asked to respond to and assess a number of your peers’ Blog Postings on Medium. The goal of these assessments is NOT to evaluate or comment on “correctness”; instead, you will be describing what you observe in the blog posting, how you experienced your peers’ writing, and how it engaged your thinking or feelings (or, conversely, failed to engage you).

These peer assessments will be made in the form of Responses directly under your peers’ Blog Postings on Medium (or you can choose to make Inline comments within the blog posting), so they’ll act as a live conversation about the rhetorical effectiveness of the writing. You will be following the directions below for each Peer Assessment that you choose to do.

Directions:

1. Find a quiet spot where you can do your work in peace and be completely in the present moment for yourself and your colleagues. Be mindful of places where there’s too much background noise. You want to be able to do your work uninterrupted and in peace and quiet. This will allow you to focus better and do the work below more thoughtfully and mindfully.
2. Take a few minutes and reread our Charter for Compassion. It is always good to remind ourselves of these important commitments to each other at these crucial moments — like before we read each other’s work. Spend at least 2 minutes reviewing these materials and decide on 1–2 compassion practices (these are the bulleted points from the Charter) you want to specifically practice while you read and draft your colleagues’ assessment letters. Write these 1–2 compassion practices down (you’ll record them in a step below). This will take 2 minutes.
3. Read your peer’s blog posting. Do NOT take any notes. Just read it, listening to the writer’s words and ideas. This should give you a sense of what the blog posting is saying, where it goes, and what the writer’s priorities are. This should take about 5 minutes.
4. Now, take 3 deep breaths and read carefully and compassionately the blog posting. Pause after reading and write for 5 minutes in a reading notes document as if you are writing to the writer of the blog. Just free-write as if you were talking to your colleague. Focus only on what your experience of reading the blog was.
5. Try responding with the TAG method:

• T = Tell your peer something you liked in the blog posting. Shed some positive attention on your peer. What are some good details, ideas, words, or sentences in this blog posting? Why are these important or significant to you as a reader? Where do you think your peer really hit a “flow” of writing? Why do you think they were so excellent here?
• A = Ask a question. As a reader, what questions pop up while you are reading the blog posting? What would you like to know more about that may be missing? Where are you most confused or stuck while reading the blog posting?
• G = Give a positive suggestion or idea for the future. Here is where you offer an idea that the writer may not have considered in their blog posting. Think of this as *feedforward* instead of simply *feedback*. What could be added to the blog posting to make it more effective in the future? Is there a particularly good point that could be expanded? Should the writer pay closer attention to a particular part of the blog posting?

6. In your Response (under the person’s Medium blog posting) post your letter of assessment to the writer. This letter should take 25–30 minutes to compose. Start with, “Dear …” and include the following sections:

• Explain to the writer the two compassion practices you choose in step #2 above. Tell them why you picked these two and briefly how successful you think you were at practicing them. If there was a place that was hard for you to be compassionate as a reader, tell the writer about that.
• Then, write a narrative of your reading, and relate your TAG method responses. This letter should be a vivid and thought-based description of your experience reading the blog posting from opening to closing. Talk directly to the writer. Remember, you can be compassionate and still say that you found part of their blog less convincing, ineffective, or just not good for some clear reason. Be sure to explain why you see things the way you do, and why those reasons/expectations are important to you in a blog posting like this.

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Attribution

Inoue, Asao B. (2019). Labor-Based Grading Contracts: Building Equity and Inclusion in the Compassionate Writing Classroom. Perspectives on Writing. The WAC Clearinghouse; University Press of Colorado. https://wac.colostate.edu/books/perspectives/labor/. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.