Essay writing… a cooperative approach in seven steps

Frank Lacey

“Essays are boring. A waste of time and anyway the teacher prefers some kids to others so his grades are never fair.”

Many teachers have heard those words and perhaps even secretly agreed. But I think essays are fun, perhaps the most fun part of my English lessons. Many of my students think so too, and there is very definitely a buzz in my class when we work with essays.

The model which I shall outline below is one that I have used for years. It fits in well with the ideas of cooperative learning, but for years I abhorred cooperative learning but still used this model every time we worked with essays.

Life as a kid is most of the time quite boring, but essays allow kids to be become gods (not just in their mothers’eyes). They are probably not aware of it if you don’t tell them, but when they write essays they achieve true divine power. They can create people, monsters, and any fantastic creatures, buildings, or countries that they want. They can cause these people to fall passionately in love, die tragically, or just live boring lives. Spark their creative fantasy, tell them about the woman who came in the door and sat down near Brian. And then tell them about the tall, elegant, sexy woman who crashed through the door, looked leeringly at Brian and sat frighteningly near Brian.

Let kids play with their characters like cats with a mouse, while at the same time giving them the full responsibility for their creations.

All of this is obvious enough – the next step is perhaps new to some you.

When the kids have written their essay for the appointed day, they then have to get three other kids in the class to read their essay. Each of these kids has to read through the essay and correct any language errors and then more importantly give three comments to the author about how to make the essay better, e.g. “the first paragraph doesn’t make sense.” “Make a more exciting ending.” “Try to include some of the things you know about America.” “Don’t use bad language ... it doesn’t work when written.”

At the end of about 45 minutes the author receives his essay again and the piece of paper that accompanies it with 3x3 comments (three kids each give three comments). The student now has one week to rework the essay. If the student decides that the comments are useless, he can choose to ignore them or he can choose to use one or two (or more) to make the essay better.

At the end of the week I, the teacher, collect the essays along with the nine comments. I correct the essay and make my own mental evaluation. Then I read the nine comments and see if things that I was unhappy with in the essay have also been commented upon by the student's class colleagues. If this is the case, then I of course ask why the student did not make use of the very good comments that she received from her classmate.

The next part is that the student now gives his essay a grade and justifies the grade. He then asks two-three classmates to give his essay a grade and likewise to justify the grade.

I too have given the essay a grade and there honestly is very seldom a difference in the five grades (the author’s, the three classmates’ grades and my grade). And we are all happy.

It sounds too good to be true, but it is. Because it is no longer the teacher but their classmates who shall first read their essays the quality rises. Why? Because let’s face it, teachers always say, “It is not good enough”, but if your classmate says, “Come on you can do better than this” or “Wow this is great” then it means a lot more. Then teachers always find faults. Teachers are of course more knowledgeable and better, but if your classmate finds faults, then maybe you should be worried because you should perhaps be at the same level as your peer.

Advice given by your classmates is generous. They want to help you to write a better essay (that’s nice) and they are proud to be able to come with suggestions. The least you can do is try to make use of their suggestions!

Then the author and her classmates give grades. No longer is it the mean, nasty teacher, thus the individual student has to take responsibility.

Does this take time? Yes, about 3-4 lessons. But it is 3-4 lessons where I have kids who are switched on.

·      They want to improve their grade, and this is a fairly easy way.

·      They are curious about what the others have written.

·      They learn from others’ mistakes.

·      They learn from their own mistakes from their peers (and research shows that peer correction is more effective than teacher correction).

·      They get to read lots of different versions of the same story and thus become aware of the huge creativity in language and among their peers.

·      Essay writing changes from being a lonely individual task to a community-supported activity.

·      A sense of collective responsibility is encouraged.

·      Students very quickly develop the ability to evaluate their own work and thus to take responsibility for their work.

Yes, they are nervous the first time, and yes the teacher needs to take responsibility and declare that it is not an option but an obligation that learning be shared for everybody’s good. Amazingly, there is very little difference in teacher grades and student grades.

In Denmark all teachers are obliged to employ the Danish curriculum called “Fælles Mål”, unless a school has written their own curriculum. Teachers have considerable freedom but should focus on 4 areas in their teaching. These four areas are

1. Communication (speaking, listening, reading and writing)
2. Linguistic precision (grammar, pronunciation etc.)
3. Language learning (how do you learn a foreign language)
4. Culture and societal studies

Thus when talking to Danish teachers I explain  that viewed from a perspective of “Fælles mål” (the national curriculum)

1.      When we share essays, we have focus on all four of the core elements in English learning: Kommunikation (communication): (Reading, writing, talking and listening). The students read lots of English. They write their three comments to each essay. They talk about errors and new ideas in English (I am very strict here… English is our language in lessons). They listen to each other because the communication is authentic. It is information that they can use to achieve higher grades.

2. Sprog og sprogbrug [linguistic precision]: They are very focused on precision in language, whether it be spelling, concord, tenses, prepositions…

3.      Sprogtilegnelse (language learning]: When sharing homework, the kids are focused on how they learn, how they can help each other learn, how other students are learning, and they learn strategies that they could employ to learn English.

4.      Kultur og samfundsforhold [culture]: I point out to my students that including cultural and societal information is a way to achieve higher grades, thus very often they draw peers' attention to possibilities for including such information in their revised essays such information.

My experience tells me that the result is kids who are seriously focused on English learning and I as a teacher have much more interesting essays to work with.

The seven steps – a summary:

1.    The student writes his essay at home.

2.    In school three students read the essay and give it three comments.

3.    The student rewrites the essay at home.

4.    The teacher collects and corrects the essay and evaluates the comments which the three students gave. The teacher then returns the essays (the following day).

5.    The student gives her essay a grade and a brief argument for the grade.

6.    Two or three other students give the essay a grade and a brief argument for the grade.

7.    The teacher reveals his/her grade and they all agree on a final grade.

Frank Lacey is an ordinary school teacher in Denmark. He works with children from 10-16 years old and preaches autonomy.