Blog #9: Reflect on your workshop experience

Today we had our first workshop. This workshop experience is far different than any other workshop that most students have conducted previously. Most workshops in high school are simple peer review groups, where students exchange papers and edit the papers they received. But that’s not what we did.

First, groups were assembled. This was a little problematic because some students didn’t have their papers. They had to go into a different group altogether so that we could get their papers going. Both classes had at least 2 or 3 students that didn’t have a rough draft. I don’t really understand why people can’t produce a rough draft, especially since the rough drafts were only 1 page, maybe not even a whole page.

Second, groups of students who had drafts were assembled. I tried to keep the groups small enough, like 4 or 5 students, nothing bigger than that. Sometimes I had to move someone from their regular group to help balance out a very small group. I thought that might be a problem, but everyone seemed okay with that idea (at least as far as I could tell). Then one person would read their paper aloud to the rest of his/her group. At first this was awkward because nobody wanted to read aloud, but once we got over that big hurdle, things went pretty well.

Most of the time, students were giving good feedback to their group members. Only a couple of times did a student hear, “Oh it’s great!” I hate it when people do that. There is nothing worse than someone telling you your paper is wonderful when we all know that papers can always use revision. I walked around and tried to help students as much as I could. If a student had a question, I tried to help him or her answer it so that he or she could work to revise before the paper was due.