Peer Reviews

This last week in school we were working on our first draft of our first essay and Professor Wexler told us to look over our papers in peer reviews. The dreaded peer reviews! It's the time when students have to share their thoughts with their fellow classmates and get criticized! It is everyone's nightmare no matter what age you are. It seems that no matter what state the draft seems to be in-even if it looks to the peer reading it as almost perfect, it is always "not even close to being finished", or "mostly brainstorming", or even "terrible and confusing so don't bother really reading it". I have found in my classes that this is always the case. Even if the student worked very hard on the first draft, their effort always gets dismissed. This phenomena finally occurred to me this week as completely unnecessary. Even as seniors at a University, we are too often embarrassed of our work, especially drafts, to take pride in. I realized that this truly is a depressing situation. As soon as someone dismisses their work as unnecessary to read, the peer reading it does not take their job of critiquing it seriously and ends up almost wasting their time.

Peer reviewing is an excellent idea and could really benefit both parties if taken seriously. The key to this is self-pride. The student whose paper it is must know that they worked to put together a paper that never has been before and it is a product of their creative ideas. They should be proud. They also need to have confidence and know that a critique of their paper is not a critique of themselves. They have to have a balance of separation from their draft. Secondly, the reader needs to have self-pride to feel as if their opinion matters. If you think your words mean nothing then you will have no input to give, however, if you know you can say something worthwhile, you will be more likely to.

As future teachers, we need to instill this confidence and pride in our students. We do this by giving them the knowledge they need and by providing a safe environment to grow and be challenged. Hopefully, we can achieve this and make peer reviewing a poignant step in the essay writing process.