 Peer review is a concept that is obviously incredibly familiar in the academic setting. You get editorial review, you get people sending stuff back to you and say, fix this, fix that. We have the sense that peer review is something that experts do. And one of the things I think that's missed in that image is the idea that it actually is peer review. In other words, everybody is engaged in a process of judging new work against what is known. We all thought more carefully about that process. I think that we would engage students in this process much earlier because it will change their way of thinking about the nature of knowledge in the field. They need to understand that it is an everyday or weekly activity in one's professional life. There's always a need to have somebody else tell you where you're going off course. And done well is as important to the intellectual process of the work as what the author has done. Nobody writes alone. Everybody finishes work alone. There's a lot that we've assumed about instructing students on peer review process that students would somehow know how to do it naturally. And I think we've asked them to do too much without giving them sufficient instruction. I wasn't taught how to do peer review. I wasn't given a course in it. I wasn't expected to look at manuscripts until I became an editor myself. It can be a very mysterious process and certainly a scary one which is why we need to talk more about how it's done and what it involves. It's sometimes very hard for students to sort of take that first step into self-editing and editing their peers. For a lot of kids through high school, you know, they do their work, they hand it in and they get it back and that's the answer, right? And suddenly the answer isn't so obvious. One of the things that students need to do is move out of the sense that there is some right answer in the back of the book or in the professor's head or somewhere it already exists. Any time that they're actively thinking as opposed to sitting back and listening to us becomes much more valuable time in terms of their gaining expertise, becoming professionalized independent thinkers. I've talked to all of you, I think, in conference now on this paper, so you've gotten my feedback and today's peer review is for you to share feedback with each other. The students in my class working on each other's drafts, what they were doing was really helping the writers produce these ideas to their best possible level. They had exchanged drafts outside of class and read them and came in prepared to give that kind of feedback. I just thought you could probably combine the first two paragraphs. I know what you're trying to get at but I feel like you took too much, too long to explain it. You should at least present it as a problem in the introduction and then give that solution in the conclusion. To me the point of such a workshop is more what the students learn from reading each other's work, just to see what else is out there. This is the one chance they have to read and be read by someone at their level. In a lot of ways, while they care about the grade that I give them perhaps, in many ways they care more about what their peers think that are in the same position as they are and being able to give them some of that feedback along with my own I think is also pretty meaningful to them. Anxiety around peer review happens more in the classroom and I think it has to do with my presence and the fact that they're uncertain about what I'm looking for and who the real audience of the paper is. So I try to stress that they're writing for people who know as much as they do but haven't gotten their reading, their angle on the material. In the cases where we use peer review in the classroom, we will have students make a presentation, for instance. We will inform people beforehand that they will be asked to comment constructively so that we can discuss what's useful, feedback and what may not be so useful. How do you know what starting concentration is to have the beginning and how much of you increase by every time? I tell students that they get to say, I liked it only once per class. They have to understand that there are collaborators here and that, you know, it's important to notice what's good in the work but you have to be focused and specific. The biggest point of those activities is to start making them sort of shock their brains into applying that same level of really detailed analytical criticism to their own work. I think you do get that socratic benefit of people really discovering within them their own tools of criticism to help each other. Coming into this class I had the notion that, you know, if I dedicated more and more time by myself to a certain essay that that was going to perfect it but, you know, really just one word or one sentence from someone else can open up possibilities for me that I would never have realized no matter how long I spent. You have to have the skills that enable you to assess not just, you know, fact by fact content but the quality of the argument, the quality of the structure of the story or the persuasion that a given writer is undertaking and you do that by forcing your students to really dissect what it is that each other has succeeded in conveying, succeeding in persuading and where they have failed and why. Learning works through the experience of doing and that's why we should have students peer review each other because it's that process of thinking about the product and evaluating it in process at the draft stage maybe and thinking about collectively having them come together to brainstorm how this could get stronger. My writing isn't the best and I know that and when people point it out to me it's all the surprising and today they actually showed me how I could actually fix my essay which was quite constructive and hopefully when I go back and look over my essay I'll be able to fix those errors which will otherwise make my essay a lot better.