Blog Post #3

Peer editing is a crucial component to individual and group learning experiences. Peer editing is the process of critiquing a person's work, ideas, or writing in a way that allows said person to make corrections and effective changes to achieve a higher standard of excellence. A peer is typically a student that is engaging in the same learning experience or is being challenged by a similar subject as yourself. I believe the best way to approach peer editing is to stay positive, find all grammatical and spelling mistakes, and make specific suggestions for specific changes. After going over your given rubric and discussing what your professor expects of the class, I think it is extremely important to start any peer editing with a compliment, as mentioned in the slide show Peer Edit with Perfection Tutorial. Tell the author exactly what you like about their work or ideas. This gives the person conducting the peer editing a chance to elaborate about what changes can be made to add detail to the things they liked about their peer's work. I believe that it is also important when peer editing, to always keep in mind what you would want someone else to say about YOUR work. Staying positive and helpful, instead of irritated and condescending can help your fellow peer more than just giving them corrections. Making specific suggestions on how to have better sentence structure, more vivid details, and more relevant content is more effective than telling your peer what you did not like about their work. After correcting grammatical and spelling errors, I believe it is most important to end your peer editing with another compliment. This gives your peers the confidence to make the suggested changes and assures them of their progress in the classroom.
For peer editing my classmates in EDM310, I will refer to the rubric our group created this week. The rubric we created was fashioned around the instructions given to us by Dr. Lomax and Dr. Strange for writing a quality blog post. Any students in the class can easily find this rubric, which will eliminate questions about the expectations and guidelines used in the peer editing process. This will ensure that my peers will meet our professors' requirements. Along with the rubric, I will use the "compliment sandwich" I described in the previous paragraph to create a comfortable and open line of communication between myself and my peers. Peer editing is vital to any learning experience because not only does it create a conversation between students that could carry on into other projects and assignments, but also allows for unbiased feedback. When the class participates in peer editing, each student benefits from every peer who views their paper. Everyone has a different view and contribution which creates a learning team within the classroom. This setup for success allows everyone to shine, instead of students stepping over each other to be the "golden" student. I think that peer editing will be an important component to our learning experience as future educators, and I am looking forward to my peers' feedback and contribution to my success in this class.