Workshop 7: Responding to Writing: Peer to Peer

Jack Wilde's Lesson

Jack uses the whole class to model peer conferencing.

Jack Wilde employs an intentional approach to teaching his fifth-grade students to respond to each other's writing. His practice includes using reader's/writer's notebooks to respond to literature, modeling response during class read-alouds, using his own writing to model response, having the whole class respond to pieces of student writing, setting up adult-mentored conference groups, and pairing the students into independent response partnerships. By November—the time his class was videotaped—Jack's students are comfortable with peer conferences. However, Jack is still using all the strategies listed above to help his students learn to respond more effectively and independently.

Workshop 7 features extensive classroom footage of four of these strategies—Jack using his own writing as a response model, a whole class response to a student's piece, an example of a response group comprised of four students and facilitated by Jack, and a peer conference featuring two students. Additionally, Jack offers insight into his methods of teaching peer conferencing and the process his students use in each conference.