Peer Conferencing

I think it is very helpful to have someone else look over my paper before I turn it in. I always peer conferencing for many reasons. First off, the person revising and editing my paper have never seen my paper before. They are reading it for the first time and are able to catch mistakes that I am not always able to catch. Sometimes when I have been working on a paper for a length of time, when I re-read my paper I end up reading it the way it should be, the way it is in my mind, instead of reading exactly what is written. Also, sometimes when writing a paper it is easy to leave out minor details about a subject that you as the writer already know about. Having someone else revise my paper ensures that my paper makes sense to a reader who has no knowledge of the subject that I am writing about. Sometimes when someone else looks over my paper they approach the topic or a portion of the paper from a different perspective that I had not thought of.

I believe that peer conferencing has many benefits. However one downfall of peer conferencing in the classroom could be that the students expect their peer to "fix" their paper for them. Some may not submit their best first draft because they know that their peer will provide ideas and edit the paper for them. Other than this downfall, I believe that peer conferencing can certainly work in a K-5 classroom.

I believe that peer conferencing could also be used in a middle/secondary content specific classroom. This could be used for science lab write-ups, history papers, book reports, etc. However, if having one person revise and then other person edit a paper takes up too much time you could have one person read through the paper twice: once for revising and once for editing.