The Value of Peer Conferences

Focusing on the Writer, Not Just the Writing

My room is noisy, seemingly chaotic, yet I am smiling.

I’m sitting in the front of the room at the table where I usually conference, but I have no one to conference with. All of my students are busy conferencing with each other. I pretend to look through papers in front of me, but I’m really just listening to snippets of conversations.

I love your fluency in the second paragraph.

I wonder why you have that one sentence paragraph there.

Have you ever considered saving your thesis for the end?

I still think you need to improve word choice to help with your tone.

I refuse to look up in fear of disrupting the productive chaos in my space, a chaos only produced by months of groundwork and culture building. I believe this productive chaos in the room is only effective, however, because of the structure.

The students are conferencing, not editing.

So what is the difference?

I’ve used peer editing for years — that rubric-based peer assessment where all the items on the peer editing rubric align with the items on the assignment rubric. Students then read the writing, scanning for missteps or weaknesses. Yes, this is well-intended to help the students earn a better grade, but peer edits often become quests for mistakes. A strong writer scours another writer’s paper to identify shortcomings that the weaker writer already fears they have, and the weaker writers find no errors in anyone’s paper, validating their perceived ineptitude while also validating the strong writers perceived awesomeness.

But a peer conference feels different. A peer conference focuses on the responders being supportive, critical, and thoughtful — and its success depends on all of these.

A peer conference requires its participants to do the following:

1. Be thoughtful: Read like a reader. While reading each other’s papers, peers need to offer reaction to what they are reading, the content, the words. They must offer feedback on what they like and where they are confused, and explain the emotional response of the piece of writing so that the writer understands the impact of his or her words.
2. Be critical: Focus on questioning. A peer conference should have questions from the responder. How can the author clarify their purpose? Where does the piece fall short at times? In what way can the writing be more clear? This pushes the writer to think more deeply about their piece of writing.
3. Be supportive: Validate voice. Make sure the conference ends on a positive comment — and all students must recognize the importance of this. Writers need to feel heard. What aspect of their writing should be praised? Every piece of writing has something to compliment, allowing the writers to discover what is working in their writing, which helps strengthen their voice.

A peer conference becomes a conversation, an opportunity to respect the other’s talents and provide alternate avenues of thought. A peer conference provides focus on the development of the writer, not just the writing, which is ultimately the goal in a writing classroom.

Listen in, if you will, to a conference two students had about their essays they were working on. And delight in the productive chaos in the background.