An Invitation: Come join our inquiry into peer feedback and revision

This Sept. 6th marks the launch of year two for the Michigan Teachers as Researchers Collaborative (MiTRC). The founding mission: to build collaborative participatory research between university and secondary teachers interested in exploring and developing the teaching and assessing of writing. At the heart of the collaborative are partnerships between the Oakland Writing Project, Chippewa River Writing Project, and Michigan State University Writing in Digital Environments senior researcher Prof. Jeff Grabill. Our focus is on the review and revision cycle that is at the core of process pedagogy and arguably the central moment for learning and improvement in writing. While revision is essential for good student outcomes in writing, we as teachers have found students don’t typically revise often or well. Research is telling us that high quality revision needs to be informed by high quality review feedback. Our research collaborative believes both revision and review must be taught, and this dynamic-how to teach both and what outcomes result-is the core of the project.

This year we continue to deepen our understanding of how to build effective peer to peer feedback and writer’s revision practices. The added facet is for us as researchers to study peer feedback in face to face models and in digital spaces. Teacher researchers will tap into multiple digital tools across the year and encourage students to consider audiences beyond teacher and peers. One digital tool in particular, Eli Review (http://www.elireview.com/), will enable us to gather and archive hundreds of student peer feedback interactions and revision decisions. Both the student artifacts and teacher inquiry will support constructing an audience-based learning progression for argumentative writing. Interested in following our learning journey? Look for future blogs from the MiTRC teacher researchers both on Digital Is and at our project website (http://sites.matrix.msu.edu/swrp/).