Throughout your time in school, most of your classes have probably been graded. If you met certain criteria, you received an “A,” a “B,” a “C,” and so on. Maybe your school used numbers, grades, or GPA-style grading, but whatever the grades looked like, the mechanism was pretty similar. Your teachers probably used a combination ...
You may think of writing as a lonely activity, something to work at in a hushed, half-lit library carrel. Or you may think of writing merely as a matter of correctness, of getting all the commas in just the right places. Or you may suffer from writing anxiety and feel unable to produce the first word, let alone the first page. These writing challenges, and many others, can be addressed in a meeting with a writing tutor. Tutoring has the reputation of being remedial, of serving students with limited writing experience. But the writing tutorial can benefit all writers—freshman, graduate, or faculty—and represents a significant learning opportunity.
Some instructors assign weekly or biweekly discussion board posts or other regular informal writing assignments, and oftentimes they require you to respond to your peers’ writing. Responding to your classmates can be an awkward or uncomfortable task because you might not want to offend them or say something silly.
As a result of this pervasive discomfort, students often just respond to a post in one of the following ways:
Make the most of your conferencing experience by being prepared before you meet with your instructor.
As an undergraduate student, you may be provided with the opportunity to have conferences with your instructor. Conferences are typically 15–20 minutes long and may be individual or small group conferences. In many cases, your instructor may cancel classes for student conferences. This is because the individualized attention you will receive in your conference is extremely valuable for your development as a writer, and the time spent in your conference will be as valuable as your time spent in class.
"In-Class Peer Review" was written by Daniel Richards.
So there is this student who has just written a draft for one of the projects assigned to him in his composition class. He is walking to class with a copy of the draft in his hand, knowing that today the instructor has an in-class peer review session planned, and his stomach drops. He begins more and more to think about the prospect of his own peers reading his work and becomes anxious.
Consider these suggestions when critiquing documents in group situations. Feedback in group situations provides an excellent opportunity to have your work read and evaluated by your peers. Rather than merely imagine how a potential audience might respond to your work, you can meet with classmates and discuss your ideas for writing projects or evaluate drafts. ...
Business leaders commonly complain that college graduate students have not learned how to work productively in groups. In American classrooms, we tend to prize individual accomplishment, yet in professional careers we need to work well with others.Unfortunately, the terms "group work," "team work," or "committee work" can appear to be oxymorons--like the terms "honest politician" or "criminal justice."
