Engage in discussion about something that captured your attention over the past few weeks in the course. Relate it back to specific class discussions, readings, and your grading/teaching when possible.

Back in Week 3, we all learned about the origins of a larger conversation about collaborative learning. Kenneth Bruffe notes that around 1982, the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) included a discussion topic that mentioned collaborative learning. Collaborative learning appeared as item eight or nine in a list of ten; a year later, it made it on the list again as the first item. Bruffe continues to open his essay by noting that sometimes collaborative methods work, and that sometimes they don’t. Every classroom interaction is unique and an instructor can only gauge the effectiveness of collaborative learning through experience. As Bruffe clearly notes, there is not a recipe that can be given to successfully navigate through the process. He instead urges educators to learn the history of collaborative learning in order to improve it and demonstrate how valuable it is.

In the 1970’s, American colleges began to see a new type of student: one that should have no problems succeeding based on a review of their credentials but, in fact were experiencing the same problems of adapting to the traditional conventions of the college classroom that the less academically prepared students were. One key point that Bruffe outlines is the fact that many undergraduate students refused to take advantage of the tutoring and counseling help offered on campus. The colleges explored several solutions to these problems, including: making it mandatory for students to attend these help sessions, implementing sink-or-swim programs to weed students out, and peer tutoring. Of these methods, peer tutoring proved to be the most helpful and led to results that showed students’ work usually improved when they received help from fellow students. Students that provided help in these peer sessions also benefitted by learning from the other students and gaining experience helping others in a teaching environment.

As a current graduate student that has temporarily stepped out of the workplace, I’ve become used to an environment of frequent collaboration, review cycles, and knowing when to ask for help. At my company (a large federal government contractor), my primary job duties were to oversee and coordinate the various stages of the proposal life cycle process for each proposal assigned to me. Some of the tasks given to me were to gauge when to bring in editing, desktop publishing, and graphics support; in addition, I provided training support, lessons learned feedback, and even printed and packaged the final proposal for delivery to the government customer. In all of these tasks, I participated in collaborative learning and teaching. We shared knowledge gained from each project we were tasked with completing and created an internal library of best practices. I would consider this work environment to be a great example of how the principles used in a collaborative composition environment (specifically one that implements peer reviews) can be beneficial. In most workplace settings, projects cannot be finalized without peers to review them. I’ve worked on projects that were important enough to the company’s goals for business development that the CEO sat in on milestone reviews and offered feedback on ways to improve a proposal. The feedback was given in a way that was helpful, not from a place of “do this or else.” Without the collaborative learning taught in settings like college composition courses, students won’t be able to settle in as employees in the workplace that contribute meaningfully to their company.

I suppose my idea of peer reviews in practice for Texas Tech’s ENGL 1301 course would be that in addition to students’ once a week in class session with their instructor, they would also meet with a Document Instructor (DI) one day a week, similar to the way recitation sessions for science courses meet. At these DI-run sessions, students would receive additional instruction on lessons from class; furthermore, sessions would also include a period where students worked together in small groups to peer review each other’s work. The environment would be informal and would function as a workshop that prepares students for submitting their best efforts as final versions of their assignments. In this scenario, the students learn to trust their own work through analysis of each other’s assignments, and DIs are given an opportunity for classroom instruction before they are required to instruct in their second year of the English department’s graduate assistanceship program. I think this approach is feasible and provides an alternative to the standard in-class group work assignments that often result in some students working harder than others.