When is helping not helping?

Can partner-checking be useful?

"Partner up and check each other's work," says the teacher.

The A student has no fear, no hesitation whatsoever, aside from a slight discomfort, knowing that she is once again going to have to lie to her C student friend and only identify a small fraction of the grammatical and structural errors she will no-doubt encounter in the paper.

The C student friend wishes for a secret portal under the table. A way to get out of this embarrassing and confidence-leaching task. She knows her A student friend will try to go easy on her, and she also knows that she will be unable to offer any suggestions for improvement in her A student friend's perfect paper.

Across the room, 2 C students partner up and, while attempting to gain something useful from the experience, they find they have little constructive advice to offer each other, aside from the addition of the odd comma, or a spelling correction.

So continues the trauma of schooling from generation to generation, as teachers continue to promote the merits of partner checking, peer assessment, paired editing, buddy proofreading...whatever you may like to call it.

Can it be successful? If yes, what would the success criteria be?

If the success criteria for partner-checking is...

• offer another opportunity for re-reading by the author

• offer an opportunity for the author to have an audience

• offer an opportunity for the author to receive feedback which leads to an improvement

then partner-checking can be a valuable classroom practice. However, it will take time to reach a point of value. Like any program implemented in a classroom, the students cannot be expected to simply know how to participate effectively. They should be taught how to partner-check, through a series of lessons which move along from modelled, to shared, to guided, to independent. If this is done well and patiently, then even very young writers can find partner-checking to be useful.

Ever a source of good, practical advice, Sheena Cameron, in The Writing Book - A Practical Guide For Teachers, has paired up with Louise Dempsey, to offer the following pointers for ensuring partner-checks are successful (some of which seem pretty straight forward, but obviously need pointing out if we're explicitly teaching these skills to little guys)

• partners sit together to both see the work

• the author holds the writing and reads it aloud to the partner

• the partner has the responsibility of being a focussed, respectful listener

• the partner is prepared with prompts (sentence starters) to guide their feedback to the partner

• the partner starts the feedback with positive comments

• there is a criteria for the writing or the author has writing goals, and this is the basis for the feedback

• the partners should be of a similar writing ability

Sheena Cameron's work is wonderful, and has helped me become a better teacher of reading and writing in recent years. If you like the partner-check advice above, more of Sheena's wisdom is available at http://sheenacameron.com/ and http://www.thewritingbook.com/

Works Cited:

Cameron, Sheena & Dempsey, Louise. The Writing Book - A Practical Guide For Teachers. S & L Publishing, 2013.

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