When done well, peer workshops can be fruitful sources of inspiration, feedback, and support for student writers. When done poorly, however, peer workshops quickly become a source of frustration and a waste of classroom time.
It is important to clearly define the purpose of peer workshops, including the potential benefit to the students' writing and consequently to their overall grades. At the beginning of the semester, take the time to discuss why you have workshops in your class. For instance, peer writing groups serve as an opportunity for each student to
practice offering and receiving writing feedback,
practice making decisions about their own writing based on feedback,
improve analysis, revision, editing, and proofreading skills,
read many models of other authors' writing,
practice working and communicating in groups, etc.
If peer workshops are part of the students' grade, highlight that fact early. You may also consider giving a handout or presentation on workshop instructions. Here are sample workshop requirements, questions, and checklists.
Additional mini-purpose conversations should ideally happen before and after every workshop session. A purpose statement before a workshop might go something like this:
Today, we're going to workshop the first drafts of our articles. Because these are first drafts, we should be focused on global concerns, including message, audience, genre, and organization. Do not mark any grammatical errors at this time. Keep in mind how frustrating it would be to spend half an hour perfecting a paragraph's grammar only to realize later that the paragraph doesn't fit into your article's organization and has to be cut. When your article is being workshopped, it is your responsibility to keep the conversation going. Don't let your group slack to the detriment of your final grade! Use the Ten Writing Priorities (PDF) handout if you get stuck. As you know, the second drafts of your articles are due in one week, so be sure to garner lots of great feedback from today's workshop so that you'll leave today inspired to revise your draft.
The overarching purpose of improving students' writing skills will stay the same throughout the semester, but the purpose of individual workshops will change. For the second draft of an article, for instance, an instructor may highlight editing skills: How does it sound? And how can you make it sound better? This workshop may look exclusively at sentence structure and word choice. Other workshops may focus on expansion, concision (PDF), evidence, introductions, conclusions (PDF), titles, research, documentation, formatting, etc.
Instructors often connect with students and show dedication by doing what their students are doing with them. If students are writing on last night's reading for ten minutes, the instructor is writing, too. If students are working in groups, the instructor is moving from group to group engaging and supporting them. Students sincerely appreciate these small moves, and instructors read about them on their evaluations often.
The one exception to this philosophy is group workshops. After modeling what peer workshops should look like (perhaps by bringing in something you are writing and encouraging the class to give feedback), and after making explicit the purpose of workshopping in general and today's workshop specifically, consider staying out of the way as much as possible. You might end your purpose statement with something like this:
While you are workshopping, I will come around and check off that all of your have your drafts and draft responses, and then I will be writing over here. I am available to you. Please interrupt me if you have any questions. I would also be happy to join your conversation for a while if you would like to invite me into your group.
After a few weeks, you might have your students write for about 20 minutes on questions such as these:
Afterward, students can discuss their answers and come up with a plan to strengthen their group's usefulness. In the end, it is up to each student and her or his group to get the most out of peer workshops. When students understand this fact, workshop groups become much more successful overall.
Instructors can successfully implement many different kinds of workshops in their classrooms. And, if one kind of workshop falls flat, you can always change up the plan mid-semester. Here are just a handful of the ways you can bring workshops into your classroom:
Again, the key is to figure out what kind of workshop will work best for your subject matter and with the students you have in the room. Remember that you can and should adapt mid-semester if your workshops aren't working.
Barnard, I. (2002). Whole-class workshops: The transformation of students into writers. Issues In Writing, 12(2), 124-143.
Debelius, M. (2010). What do we talk about when we talk about workshops? Charting the first five weeks of a first-year writing course.
In J. Harris, J. D. Miles, & C. Paine (Eds.), Teaching with student texts: Essays toward an informed practice (pp. 154-162). Logan, UT: Utah State University Press.
Eades, C. (2002). A working model of pedagogical triangulation: A holistic approach to peer-revision workshops. Teaching English In The Two-Year College, 30(1), 60-67.
Johnson, J. P. (2002). Critical reading and response: Experimenting with anonymity in draft workshops.
In C. Moore & P. O'Neill (Eds.), Practice in context: Situating the work of writing teachers (pp. 196-204). Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.