Creating Student Experts for Collaborative Learning

As always, the readings were provocative and forced me to revisit my instruction, though this week I found myself mostly nodding in agreement. I was grateful to see Hartwell because I've long despised the notion of teaching grammar, and though I knew there was a theoretical foundation for my opposition, Hartwell spelled it out nicely. (In the interests of full disclosure, though, I should admit that I generally mark up at least one page of each student's assignment in the much-denigrated formalist approach, so while I hate teaching grammar, I also hate grammar errors.) What struck me most, though, was Bruffee's discussion of collaborative learning. I've long liked the idea of collaborative learning, and often try to add more of it to the class, but Bruffee's discussion of the socially-constructed nature of knowledge made me vow to be much more diligent. In particular I was struck by his idea that "reflective thought is public or social conversation internalized" (549). The old chestnut of instruction is that we are trying to teach critical thinking, but so often we (or at least I) imagine that such thinking can exist without the conversation--that students can think critically without having ever conversed critically. That said, I think one key component of such conversations is the notion that knowledge is not created by just any social interaction, but by communities of knowledgeable peers (per Kuhn). As such collaborative learning in the classroom needs not only to foster collaboration, but also to foster the students' sense that they are knowledgeable and worthy of critical participation in the conversation. I think this second point is why a lot of peer reviewing of student writing degenerates into either empty praise or minute discussions of misplaced commas. My most recent attempt at a solution is to work to change the concept of peer review utilizing a rhetorical approach. Instead of asking the students to act as writing experts, I would like them to act simply as an audience, and every rhetorical audience is automatically expert because moving the audience is the point of the rhetoric. Coupled with this might be a move to have the peer-review process take place over multiple drafts, with the first "drafts" being entirely oral. Students would simply make their case to their review group, and the group would respond, all in conversation. The major flaw in this approach is simply that students aren't idiots, and if I'm grading the paper then all the talk about their peer group being the audience is simply hot air, and they will know it. And that's a problem that still stumps me.