Constructive Commentary
At a Glance
Discipline
- Languages and Literature
Instructional Level
- College & CEGEP
Course
- Any of CEGEP English or other courses where creative writing is included.
Tasks in Workflow
Social Plane(s)
- Group
Type of Tasks
- Reviewing & assessing peers
Technical Details
Useful Technologies
- Google docs or other text-sharing platforms (for both in-person & online)
Class size
- Small (20-49)
Time
- Single class period (< 90 mins)
Inclusivity & Accessibility
- Diversity of engagement
- Variety of action & expression
Instructional Purpose
- Application & knowledge building
- Consolidation & metacognition
Overview
In this activity, students comment on each other’s recent creative output (usually one or two poems). The activity provides students the opportunity to identify and show their understanding of literary terms as well as to compose practical, concrete, and specific comments that can help their peers edit and polish their work.
In small groups of 4-5, students are given access to each other’s creative drafts; they must build comments on 2 of the others’ in the group, either through online comment boxes or in-person notations on the text. This falls under both peer assessment and peer review.
This activity occurs after students have written first drafts; it takes 60-90 minutes, and can occur synchronously in class or asynchronously online.
Topic: Any topic where creative writing is generated; the specific examples here are for poetry.
Instructional Objectives
Students:
- build diplomatic communication skills.
- apply their knowledge of literary terminology.
- gain concrete, practical experience in editing and revision skills.
Workflow & Materials
Activity Workflow
Contributor's Notes
- Students practice a thoughtful and encouraging style of peer response.
- Student commenters
- practice using accurate and contextualized terminology.
- develop creative solutions and suggestions for their peers.
- Students receiving comments
- feel encouraged by positive feedback.
- are presented with solutions and alternatives but in a non-prescriptive way (compared to getting feedback from a teacher).
- The in-person exercise creates a positive classroom dynamic.
- Students are often initially shy to share their creative output and/or shy to suggest changes.
- Students initially struggle to make concrete suggestions.
- For the online exercise
- the teacher must keep track of many different groups and documents to verify that the assignment has been completed and that the tone of comments is appropriate.
- the teacher should also recommend a distribution of comments that ensures that every member of a group gets equal feedback.
- For the in-person exercise
- the teacher has less direct evidence of individual comments (they must get the ‘tone’ from what they hear circulating around the classroom).
- Keep the groups small: 4 is an ideal number, but 3-5 works.
- When the exercise is repeated twice or more throughout the semester, the benefits are amplified.
Applied Strategies
Published: 25/04/2025
Copyright: © 2025 Lynch. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication on this website is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.