Mood Boards and Revision

Mood Boards and Revision

Peer review or workshop is a technique frequently used in composition classes, but it seems that students often struggle giving precise feedback about classmates' writing. 

from UConn Today

I frame students' role in peer review as readers, rather than "fixers," of each others' work, and I explain that their goal should be to express to each other their experience in reading each others' drafts. To that end, I suggest that comments include things like "I got confused here because . . ." rather than "You need to change this." However, it seems that students often still struggle to give feedback that's precise and helpful, and they seem to have particular difficulty with critical feedback. I suggest using mood boards as a way to help students convey their experience of reading a peer's draft. Mood boards could be by students during peer review or included during student-instructor conferences.

• When students exchange work for peer review or workshop, ask each student to choose one person in their group for whom they will create a mood board. Students will read and comment on each others' work as usual, but when they meet to review, the student who made the mood board will begin the discussion by showing his/her mood board to the other students, who can then comment on the mood board and the text. The mood board can function here as a way for students to give the writer a sense of the voice and mood created by their text.
• An instructor could also use mood boards when conferencing individually with students. An instructor could require a student to bring his/her mood board to the conference, and the mood board could become a tool for talking about the process of writing the text, as well as next steps for revision.

Do you have other ideas or thoughts about how to use mood boards? I'd love to hear any ideas or experiences in the comments.