Peer Writing Response Groups in a Language Minority Classroom

In the fall of 1995 I was offered an opportunity to engage in a teacher action research project sponsored by the California Writing Project. At the time I was a bilingual teacher in the upper elementary grades working in a school in a lowincome area. In my classroom I used a writing process approach–writers’ workshop–to help my students become more proficient writers. But over the years I had become dissatisfied with the depth of analysis my students were able to demonstrate regarding their own and each other’s writing. I decided to try formal peer response groups to see if this would facilitate their ability to become better writers and better at responding to literature. I saw that response groups might be a way to help the students get beyond superficial analysis. I would use this research project to help me study the effectiveness of this strategy with my students. Throughout my career my goal has been to have my students be as independent as possible. It is in this way that they will be empowered to succeed as adults, to feel respected, and to enjoy learning. It is equally important that they learn to work together (i.e., the interpersonal/social aspect). To succeed in practically any arena in life, both the ability to know how to work toward one’s own goal and the ability to work with others are essential. I thought the use of peer writing response groups–the focus of this paper–would be a great way to better prepare my students for these long term goals while also building as appropriate skills and abilities. When I began the investigation of this paper, I had been using writers’ workshop in my classroom for seven years based on what I had learned from books, from workshops on the practice, and from colleagues. I had come to think of myself as somewhat of an expert on writers’ workshop to the point where I was regularly giving workshops to other teachers on how to set up a writers’ workshop in their classrooms. Originally I developed my model of writers’ workshop directly from Lucy McCormick Calkin’s book, The Art of Teaching Writing (Calkins, 1994), and from Nancie Atwell’s book, In the Middle (Atwell, 1998). Over the years I adapted it and changed it based on my style and the particular needs of my students in any given year, or time of year. I was always looking for ways to improve on it, make it run smoother and more powerfully. I was constantly learning new strategies from other teachers and new writings on the topic as well. I had found writers’ workshop to be an effective way to get my students to engage in writing. They found writing enjoyable. They experienced a pride in what they wrote and in what their peers wrote. I also saw growth in their writing over time as they continued to write and receive response and guidance over the year, or often two-year period, that I worked with my students. However, I was not seeing my students engaged in the kind of serious revision of their work that I was looking for. Nor was I hearing deep, “under the surface” questions being asked about their own or each other’s writing. While I had known about peer writing response groups for years from colleagues at other schools and at workshops, I had not tried using this technique myself. I had always used one-on-one peer critiquing, whole class response, and informal peer response in my class. My question for investigation would be: How would the method I developed of running peer response groups affect their level of critical analysis of writing and their independence and interdependence as writers?