Peer Correction

I recently asked a class of students to write a short paragraph and then email me the finished work. The only catch was that they had to receive feedback from 3 people in their class before sending it to me. The hope was that this would lead to a more polished piece of work before it reached me. Needless to say, this somewhat lazy, unstructured approach to peer correction didn't really work out. There were glaringly obvious problems that I knew other students would have spotted, yet they were still there. With many students, I think, there is a certain discomfort (whether personal, cultural or social) with giving opinions on the work of their peers.

I was reading around on peer correction recently. The British Council give a short little piece on peer correction and manage to point out a way of doing it, the benefits and possible problems, all in a very short piece. If you haven't come across it, the BALEAP website is quite good. They are especially generous in putting up slides and notes from conferences for free. I found this one  (by Mary Martala-Lockett & Claire Weetman) and this one (by Jane Sjoberg)which deal specifically with peer correction and make some very good points.

I also found this lesson plan (by Ania Rolinska) which talks about peer correction using Wikis. She uses a really clever colour coding system (highlight green for grammar, yellow for vocabulary, etc.) which is ideal for students working with computers, either inside or outside the class.

For those who are working in an IELTS preparation class, I have put together this peer correction lesson. The idea is to ask students to peer correct with very specific goals. It is based on a part 1, graph writing task that I took from Writefix and uses the Public IELTS Writing Band Descriptors.

Click here for a PDF of the Lesson

A follow up could be to ask students to rewrite the task, bearing in mind peer feedback, and submit to teacher.

In-text referencing

To carry on from the previous lesson which introduced the idea of Harvard referencing and recognising the elements in the bibliography, this is a short little lesson which acts as an introduction to in-text referencing (According to Smith (1990, p. 5), blah, blah, blah, blah).

I think a lot of students struggle with this concept and can end up inadvertently plagiarising because they may not really get the why and the how of using references. I think there is scope for a nice general, introductory, discussion based lesson on referencing - the purpose or need for it - which I might do later. And actually, that kind of lesson would be really suitable at the start of a course; to get students to buy into the concept of referencing and to see the need for it.

Unfortunately, this lesson isn't that kind of lesson (I will do up something on that lesson in a later post and put a link to it here). Instead, this lesson focuses on the nuts and bolts of in-text referencing.

It should take about 30 minutes and gives students a chance to practise creating accurate, Harvard style, in text references. Please let me know if you have any thoughts or suggestions.

Click here for a PDF of the lesson 

Introduction to Referencing - Harvard Style

There are some amazing tools out there, like Zotero, that can really cut the drudge out of referencing. However, I think there is still an argument for a few lessons on referencing with students. It's important for them to understand the basic idea of referencing - that it exists for a reason, not just to make their life difficult. And maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I also think it is worth knowing where all the words, numbers, commas and full stops go, just in case this whole computer malarkey doesn't work out.

I put together this short lesson as an introduction to two things for students. First of all, it introduces them to the wonderful Anglia Ruskin referencing webpage and gets them to explore it a little bit. It really is such a helpful webpage and answers almost every referencing question you can think of.

The second part of the lesson breaks down a typical book reference and gets students to recognise the little bits and bobs and then try to do one themselves.

The lesson is only one page and might take about 20 - 30 minutes. If you have any comments or suggestions, please let me know.

Click here for the lesson PDF

Exploiting Ted talks

I'm a bit late to the Flipped Learning Party, but even I can see the potential of Ted.com to get students doing work outside the class that can lead to really interesting and productive lessons in the classroom.

I took this very interesting talk by Emily Balcetis and put together a lesson that you might find interesting. The goals of this lesson were to:

• encourage students to do listening practice outside of class
• encourage discussion in the follow up class
• introduce the idea of assessing a speaker (my students have to give presentations so it is nice to get them looking at talks critically)
• introduce/consolidate some ways of evaluating the reliability of a source

Please let me know if you used the lesson, if you found it useful and if you have any suggestions. 

Click here for the lesson PDF

Group Writing Project

One of the things our students have to do is a referenced essay. Over the course of the academic year, they might have to do about five or six of these (e.g. a chemistry essay, a biology essay, generic-EAP type essays).

In previous years, the process of writing such essays was broken down over a series of lessons and students did these individually. My colleagues and I found ourselves repeating the same things over and over and the resulting essays always varied significantly in quality. We would encourage our students to compare their work with one another but they never really did this with any great enthusiasm.

This year, we decided to try out a group writing project. I did a little bit of googling and put together a plan for a 9 week group writing project. The students only have one writing class per week, so this was essentially 9 two hour lessons on the topic. The format of the classes was mostly workshop. I know a lot of teachers work in environments where you might have new students joining the class on a weekly basis, which might make such a group writing project unworkable, but if you did have the same group of students for an extended period (e.g. exam prep classes, summer courses), then a variation of this approach might be worth trying.

These are some of the things that seemed to work well for me:

• Divide students into small groups. Three is a nice number.
• Assign a role to each student. One can be the project manager. Their role is to set goals, deadlines etc. One can be quality control. Their role is to ensure standards are high. They can do this by checking in with other groups. The final student can be secretary. Their role is to make sure the group discussions take place in English and to take notes during the discussions.
• I set the topic for the students. You could let them choose a topic but I wanted to get cracking from the off.
• I created a lesson by lesson overview for the first lesson. This plan showed the aspects of writing that would be covered in each class (e.g. finding sources, bibliographies, topic sentences, introductions, paragraphing, paraphrasing, in text citations, cohesion, proofreading) and a corresponding target for each week (e.g. collection of possible sources, plan, introduction, 1st body paragraph etc.).
• Each time they wrote a section (e.g. introduction, first paragraph), they could send it to me, but only if it had been checked by all other members of the group.

These are some of the positives that have come from doing it:

• The students seem to be thinking a lot more critically about their writing.
• They say things to each other that last year I would have been saying. It is a joy to hear one student telling another to “check the Anglia Ruskin webpage” or that their topic sentence doesn’t match the content of the paragraph. And they seem to listen more when it is a student telling them, rather than me.
• Overall, it improves the atmosphere in the class and grounds abstract ideas like coherence in a tangible piece of work that they are continually working on.
• The standard of work they have produced thus far is good. I’ve seen less plagiarism, less incoherence and tidier looking essays.
• At the very start of the project, we discussed reasons why the project would be helpful as well as possible problems that might come up and how we might deal with them (e.g. students not doing their fair share of work). This was good as it meant they bought it into it a bit more and had a more realistic idea of how it might go.

Some problems:

• There have been a couple of less enthused students who haven’t contributed as much as others. I think this is inevitable. I’ve dealt with it by not really dealing with it. I talk to the project managers and ask them to discuss with their groups how to resolve the issue. Generally, the project manager has ended up becoming a bit more autocratic and simply giving specific tasks and deadlines to the person not carrying their weight.
• It had a nice momentum over the first five weeks. Then we had a break for exams and then a week off. It meant we lost a bit of steam toward the end. Would work best if uninterrupted.

So overall, I’ve found it to be a worthwhile approach and pretty adaptable. I used to teach IELTS classes with rolling enrolment and I think this kind of thing might be workable on a small scale – say over three or four lessons – if the task were a writing part 2 essay. Would be interested to hear if anyone has tried anything like that.