Peer Review - College Essay

Aim:
How can we improve our college essays?

Subject/Grade Level:
English/11th Grade

Description:
Students review each others' college essays to compliments and make suggestions for improvements.

Objectives:
Students will be able to give constructive criticism. Students will be able to compare their essays with their peers.

My Educational Skill Goals:
To give the students the vocabulary and writing style to be able to criticize constructively.

Materials:
Writing material, e-mail, Internet.

Internet Resources Involved:

• Everybody's a Critic"
• Don't Go Here

Procedures:

• Students write an essay based on one of the following topics, and put it as a link to their homepage so other students may read it:
  1. If you could invite someone over to dinner from the past, present, or future, who would you invite and why?
  2. You have been elected to speak at our high school graduation. What will you say? Write your speech.
  3. What experience has been most significant to you personally? How has it affected your life?
  4. Write an essay about yourself. Be sure to discuss values and goals and the reasons why they are important.
  5. What is the hardest thing you've ever had to do? Explain the experience and what you learned form it.
  6. Write about an activity that best describes you and your personality.
  7. Write about an event in your life that has made a lasting impression. Describe how that special event has affected your life.
  8. A successful college community depends greatly on the intellectual and pesonal contributions of its individual members. Please share with us what you believe other students should learn from you, both inside and outside the classroom.
  9. There are limitations to what grades, scores, and recommendations can tell us about any candidate. Please let us know something about you that we might not learn from the rest of your application.
  10. "Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body," attributed to Sir Richard Steele, 1709. Discuss a book that you have read recently which exercised your mind, and perhaps affected your behavior.
  11. Discuss some issue of personal, local, or national concern and how and why it is important to you.
  12. You are asked to bury a time capsule containing four items of imortance in understanding you and your world. What items would you include and why?
• Students read:
  • "Everybody's a Critic"
  • "Don't Go Here!"
• Next the students each are given a partner and the partner's College Essay Address. Each student first describes what they liked about the their partner's essay. For example, What worked well? What details seemed especially vivid or striking? What will you remember about this paper? Then the student reviewer makes inquiries about what was read to help the partner expand their work. For example, Did you have any questions when you finished reading? Is there something or someone you would like to learn more about? Did you not understand what something meant, or why it was included? Did something bother or disturb you? Did you suspect something might have worked better another way? Was there anything that you could adopt to your own essay?
• The students e-mail each other with their comments.
• Finally they let each other know if they used any of their suggestions.

Class Time:
This would take three, 40 minutes classes.

Problems/Issues that may be encountered:
Students have a tendency to do short shrift to reviewing their neighbors' work. The first time I did this, they only wrote superficial comments, compliments, suggestions and questions.

Solutions/workarounds:
The specific list of qusetions should help and I plan to expand on this. Also grading them on their comments instead of just on their essays should help.On the Net, old good examples can kept, the names deleted and used again.

Assessment measures:
In addition to grading the essays, students should be asked to reflect and write their experience sharing their writing.