Collaboration in Writers Workshop

Students struggle with revision because they do not know how to evaluate their own writing

as readers (Philippakos, 2017). When teaching students about the stages in Writers Workshop,

some of the most important, yet difficult to master, can be the editing and revising stages.

Students have difficulty because many times they are taught to focus on sentence by sentence

grammatical editing, instead of revision of the entire text, in regard to the organization of ideas.

What must be taught is revision for clarity of the writing, which can be done more effectively

among peers. Students can be taught to peer edit and revise effectively and respectfully via many

techniques, ranging from mini-lessons, modeling, conferences, checklists, rubrics, and so on. The

tools and resources provided for students are the pathway to their independence during the

editing stage of the writing process. The ultimate goal to peer collaboration is to encourage

students to self-reflect on their work and the work of their peers in order to improve because, an

effective reviser can improve the quality of the text they generate (Saddler, Saddler, & Cuccio-

Slichko, 130).

According to Jasmine and Weiner (2007), one of the many benefits to peer editing is that

students are also acquiring the skill of writing for an authentic audience because they know

others will also be reading their writing. If students feel as if they are writing only for the

teacher, they are less inclined to write with passion and personal interest. When students

exchange work to be analyzed, they are able to take the role as the author and the audience,

which gives them the opportunity to evaluate the needs of the audience and what is needed to

clarify the thoughts presented in the writing. Peer editing can help students understand how to

write for a reader, which in turn helps those students understand that if their compositions are not

readable, they have written in vain because their ideas will not be comprehensible. As students
reread their compositions, they should be asking themselves if what they are writing fits their

purpose and meets the needs of their intended audience.

A common belief among primary school teachers is that their students are not

developmentally able to revise each others, or their own writing. According to Jasmine and

Weiner (2007), Mini-lessons are a great way to improve students editing abilities. Modeling the

stages during the writing process in small portions can be effective for students to retain the

information. For example, focusing on one needed improvement area such as capitalization or

punctuation editing during a mini-lesson, can improve students abilities to edit their peers

capitalization or punctuation errors in their writing. Referring to Augers (2014) study of buddy

editing in a first-grade classroom, the teacher continually modeled the actions and comments that

should take place during buddy editing, further supporting the idea that instructing students to be

effective revisers should be a process that is modeled and scaffolded, such as with any new

foreign concept. Practice to understand what is expected and looked for during this stage in the

writing process can enhance the experience, which is why mini-lessons are essential in the

students success during the revising and editing stage because many students are unfamiliar

with these processes. According to Tompkins (2008), for students to understand the process of

revising and editing, it is the teachers job to introduce the topic, share examples, provide

information, guide the practice, and assess the students learning.

For students to know what is expected of them and their peers during the revising and

editing stages, the use of checklists and rubrics can be detrimental in guiding students through

the process because they have a point of reference when giving suggestions. Checklists can be

used as a way of allowing students to evaluate themselves and their peers. They facilitate the

process because they have explicit guidelines and expectations that are clear to the students when
assessing writing during the editing stage. Research by Philippakos (2017) argues that the use of

rubrics that contain every aspect of what is expected within a piece of writing, whether it be a

beginning, middle, and end to a narrative story, or a descriptive setting and characters, provides a

point of reference for the students when reviewing writing. Rubrics should be developed that

will allow readers to assign scores on those evaluation criteria and make comments

(Philippakos, 2017). The rubrics can be used to assess and then compare different levels of work

with different needs, so students are able to evaluate what can be changed to clarify the meaning.

The Writing Workshop approach contributed many factors to creating a positive writing

atmosphere. These included opportunities for students to choose what they wished to write, to

work with peers, and to experience individual time with the teacher (Jasmine & Weiner, 2007).

According to Jasmine and Weiners (2007) study, conferences should be held between teacher

and students, as well as between the students editing each others work, so that they are able to

discuss and give deeper meaning to ideas they could develop more in their writing. It is crucial to

understand the outcome of writing interactions students will have during the writing process,

because peer editing can be affected based on how students perceive each other and their ability

to be open-minded when considering other perspectives. Although students tend to gravitate

towards like-minded and similar people to themselves based on factors such as race, ethnicity,

age, gender, socioeconomic status, and perceived intelligence, according to Christianakis (2010),

it is important to create peer interactions with a heterogeneous mix of students to balance the

ideas and creativity among the entire classroom. All students have a unique perspective to share

when commenting, whether it be regarding the illustrations, the content, the main idea, or any

element of the writing.

 In the essay, Auger (2014) reflects on the use of buddy editing in a first grade classroom,

after years of attempting to implement it in a multilingual environment. She focuses on the idea

that for many students, English is the second language being learned, so the students are still

unfamiliar with spelling patterns, punctuation rules, and grammatical structures in English. I

have also tried selecting a limited scope of errors to address based on an analysis of my students'

writing. I would flag problems in a text that I hoped children would be able to then resolve in

order to produce a cleaner copy as a final draft for publication (Auger, 2014). From this quote,

it is important to understand that overwhelming the students with errors to correct can have more

of a negative effect on the editing process. Instead, students should focus on gradually improving

repeated errors, few at a time. In agreement, Paz and Sherman (2013) note that breaking up the

revising process into multiple steps that are focused on individually, instead of all at once, tends

to produce a more polished result. Writers usually make four kinds of changes as they revise,

which includes adding, substituting, deleting, and moving text from one place to another in order

to produce the most clarity. Only one type of revision should be focused on at a time. As a

starting goal, students can aim for making at least three productive changes to another persons

draft.

According to Tompkins (2008), some of the activities that should take place during the

revising and editing stage are rereading the rough draft, sharing it in a writing group, and

revising based on feedback received from the writing group. When in writing groups, students

should offer the author choices; give the author responses, feelings, and thoughts; show different

possibilities in revising; and speed up revising. The six steps in peer editing groups are: the

writer reads, listeners offer compliments, writer asks questions, listeners offer suggestions, repeat

the process for all students in the group, and then writers plan for revision. Encourage students to
focus on aspects of writing such as leads, descriptive words, details, dialogue, excitement,

organization, setting, sequence, characters, voice, point of view, repeated words, and

punctuation. Highlight peer editing stances the students can take, such as critical, empathetic,

inquisitive, directive, and many others. The idea behind these is to provide students with a

framework on how to objectively edit their peers writing.

Students can be assigned writing workshop groups or choose them independently. Either

way, they are to listen to each others writing and provide responsive feedback based on their

ability to understand and relate to it. It is essential to provide students with the ability to properly

comment on their peers writing, whether it be through sentence starters or modeled constructive

questions and comments. For example, in one study done in a first-grade classroom, each day at

the end of the writing hour, two children read their work aloud to the class, show the

accompanying illustrations, and ask their peers for questions or comments. This sharing time is a

primary way for my students to learn to talk about writing and to respect their classmates'

original texts (Auger, 2014). Encourage students to use phrases that are polite and will not hurt

anyones feelings. The teacher can provide sentence stems such as: I like; I got confused when;

tell me more about; your writing reminds me of; my favorite part is; or could you try to.

Although there are many potential reasons that writers, particularly less

skilled writers, struggle with the intricacies of revision, research indicates young writers

can create effective and meaningful changes when provided with supports including time to

revise, teacher-to-student and student-to-student conferences, rubrics, and revising strategies

(Van Gelderen, 1997) (Saddler, Saddler, & Cuccio-Slichko, 130). The intended outcome of

teaching students to effectively peer edit was to produce independent writers that are eventually

able to self-assess their own work. Such instruction is important for students (a) to value the
process and clarify how it differs from editing, (b) to learn procedures that can guide their

reviewing effort, and (c) most important, to learn how to evaluate writing in general and their

own writing in particular (Philippakos, 2017).