Supporting Writers’ Self- and Peer-Evaluation of Writing
This microcredential represents educators' effective and consistent support of writers’ self-evaluation and peer evaluation of writing in process.
This is the sixth microcredential in the Teaching Text Creation stack. This stack of microcredentials fulfills one of the requirements for the Secondary Literacy endorsement. It also fulfills one of the requirements for the Secondary Literacy Intervention endorsement.
To earn this microcredential you will collect and submit two sets of evidence demonstrating your effective and consistent support of writers’ self-evaluation and peer evaluation of writing in process. You will also complete a written or video reflective analysis.
Sometimes, teachers perceive self-evaluation or peer-evaluation as a replacement for feedback from or evaluation by the teacher or another audience. Instead, teaching students to evaluate each other’s writing can activate their critical awareness of what makes writing effective while giving students authentic audiences among their peers. Teachers should include self- and peer-evaluation as integral parts of developing students’ critical awareness of writing and ability to reflect on their own writing processes and decisions.
This microcredential partially fulfills competency 5 for the Secondary ELA endorsement. Successful completion of this microcredential will show that teachers of writing engage students meaningfully in self- and peer-evaluation of writing to “analyze and evaluate the appropriateness and effectiveness of their own and others’ text creations.”
This microcredential also partially fulfills competency area 9 for the Secondary Literacy Intervention endorsement.
Self-evaluation is when students read and critique their own written product (at any phase of the process) and/or writing process as a means to understanding which writing choices were effective and which aspects of their process they might change in future writing situations. The focus should be on reflection that moves writers forward in the writing task or in a future writing scenario.
Peer Evaluation:Peer evaluation is when students read and critique a peer’s writing during any phase of the process to provide useful feedback that moves the peer forward in the writing process for this writing task or a future writing task. The goal is to develop analytical and critical evaluation skills that allow peers to become critical readers of each other’s work in an environment that pushes writers to reflect on and improve their writing.
Writer’s Workshop :Writer’s workshop is a structure that allows for ongoing peer feedback throughout the writing process as writers share their work with each other and discuss what is or isn’t working in the writing as well as brainstorm next steps or possible revision opportunities. Writer’s workshops, when used, should be integrated throughout the writing process so peers can establish trust with each other and can integrate the feedback provided by their writing groups.
Ms. Alvarez feels like her efforts to include peer feedback in the student writing process have never resulted in meaningful learning but have felt like a waste of time. She notices that students often seem disengaged with each other’s writing or don’t know how to identify revision opportunities besides surface-level sentence errors such as spelling, punctuation, or capitalization. She is interested in fostering students’ investment in their own and their peers’ writing by helping them develop a writer community where students want to give and receive feedback to each other that challenges and moves their writing forward in more substantive ways. She understands that peer evaluation isn’t a replacement for teacher feedback, but she hopes that including peer evaluation in the writing process will improve student writing, and more importantly, students’ abilities to critically and honestly evaluate and give meaningful feedback to each other’s writing.
Category: Preparation and Planning
Submit the evidence below to demonstrate your effective and consistent support of writers’ self-evaluation and peer evaluation of writing in process.
Submit two lesson plans and relevant supplementary materials (e.g., handouts, directions, exemplars, peer review sheets, etc.) that you have developed and used as a part of your instruction with students. These lesson plans should demonstrate your effective and consistent support of writers' self-evaluation and peer evaluation of writing in process.
One lesson plan should demonstrate the way peer-evaluation is included to support the teaching of writing. The second lesson plan should demonstrate how self-evaluation supports writers’ development. The lesson plans may be from the same unit or related to the same writing task, but they do not have to be.
The lesson plans may take place at any point during the writing process (in other words, the evaluation does not just have to occur at the end or with a complete draft, but could occur during prewriting, drafting, revision, etc.). They may take the form of a range of structures: writer’s workshop, peer tutoring, peer review, student self-reflection of the writing process, etc.
Each lesson plan should demonstrate how the teacher prepares students to do the work of critically evaluating their own and their peer’s writing. In other words, the lesson should go beyond assigning peer or self-evaluation, and should demonstrate how the teacher teaches these evaluation skills to students.
A description of the lesson should situate the lesson within a unit (e.g., what have students done before and what will they do after this lesson?). The lesson plan should address how student writers will use self-evaluation, peer-evaluation, and/or writer’s workshop to improve their writing, whether for this task and/or for a future writing task.
Category: Implementation
Submit BOTH of the evidence options below to demonstrate your effective and consistent support of writers’ self-evaluation and peer evaluation of writing in process.
Submit two learner work samples each for peer-evaluation and self-evaluation (for a total of four learner work samples) from the lesson plans you submitted for Evidence of Preparation and Planning. Work samples should include any relevant artifacts that demonstrate how students engaged with each other in discussion and/or evaluation of their own and their peers’ writing. Artifacts may include peer review sheets, video or audio recordings of peer writing conferences or discussions, student writing with notes or markings reflecting peer discussions, etc. To the extent possible, the learner work samples should reflect a range of student writing abilities to show how the peer and self-evaluation process impacts the writing of students across a range of ability levels and writing experience. In other words, candidates should not submit just the best examples of peer- and self-evaluation from their students.
Be sure to follow your district/charter policies for student privacy.
For each of the learner work samples submitted, include a brief statement written by the student whose sample was included (for a total of four statements) that answers both parts of the following question: “How did this peer (or self) evaluation exercise influence my ability to critically evaluate writing? How did the exercise improve my own writing?”
Review Criteria
Criterion 1: Peer-evaluation strategies are used during writing instruction to develop students’ ability to evaluate the appropriateness and effectiveness of each other’s writing.
Criterion 2: Self-evaluation strategies are used during writing instruction to develop students’ ability to evaluate the appropriateness and effectiveness of their own writing and their own progress throughout the writing process.
Criterion 3: Lesson plans and student work samples demonstrate the ways self- and peer-evaluation are explicitly taught and modeled during writing instruction to foster critical evaluation and response skills that extend beyond superficial sentence-level response to writing.
What challenges have you faced as you’ve incorporated peer and/or self-evaluation of writing in your teaching? What strategies or approaches have you tried in response to these challenges?
Discuss how your students’ participation in peer- and self-evaluation informs the way you teach writing and/or evaluate students’ writing.
How do you plan to adopt or modify self- and/or peer-evaluation in future teaching to support your students as critical evaluators of writing and more agentive writers?
Review Criteria
Criterion 1: Reflection demonstrates use of self- and peer-evaluation during the writing process to support meaningful writer development.
Criterion 2: Reflection addresses challenges to incorporating self- and peer-evaluation of writing, particularly among students with a range of learning needs and abilities.
Criterion 3: Reflection demonstrates the use of student performance in self- and peer-evaluation to modify instructional and asses
https://www.scribd.com/document/355914521/chanski-and-ellis-peer-feedback
In this English Journal article, Chanski and Ellis discuss a teacher inquiry project that took place in an AP English class where the teacher supported students in learning to give meaningful peer evaluation to each other’s writing. They describe strategies that make the experience meaningful for student writers.
Hall, M. (2009). The Politics of Peer Response. The Writing Instructor.
www.writinginstructor.com
This piece blends theories and practice of building peer response practices in writing classrooms. Looking at some sample peer review sheets, the article encourages teachers to consider how they set up their teaching and review practices.
Thank You for Sharing: Developing Students’ Social Skills to Improve Peer Writing Conferences
https://lead.nwp.org/knowledgebase/thank-you-for-sharing-developing-students-social-skills-to-improve-peer-writing-conferences/
In this English Journal article, Franklin shares strategies for teaching students how to engage with each other more meaningfully as peer respondents to writing.
A (Writing) Library of Possibility: Structure and Freedom
movingwriters.org
In this blog post, Tricia Ebarvia shares the strategies she developed to set up a writer’s workshop structure in her classroom, including a portfolio she has students submit to document their growth as writers through the process.
Position Statement on Writing Instruction in School
https://ncte.org/statement/statement-on-writing-instruction-in-school/
NCTE and its constituent groups have developed position statements on a variety of education issues vital to the teaching and learning of English language arts.
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