Building Community through Collaboration

Community Building in a Post-Pandemic Educational Era Through Peer Response

As teachers of many grades and subjects, we are all feeling a shift since the pandemic… in ourselves, in our students, and in our relationships. It is hard to lead a classroom and respond to individual students’ needs when we are still recovering ourselves from the uncertainty and upheavals of the past two years. Not to mention that it is not over… I still have to wear a mask at my school, so I haven’t seen many of my students’ faces, nor them mine. As a high school teacher, I am grieving some students that I taught for two years who graduated now without us ever getting to exchange smiles in class. It makes it hard to genuinely connect, and we are all feeling the strain of lost personal connection and community.

The good and bad news is: what teachers are noticing is supported by growing data. A recent survey of 362 school counselors across the United States found an alarming increase in anxiety, school fights, and impaired learning abilities. The COVID pandemic has left students “behind in their abilities to learn, cope, and relate” (Miller & Pallaro, 2022). Zach Schonfeld writes in The Hill, “Many students across the United States are socially and emotionally frozen at their age when the pandemic hit.” The counselors surveyed specifically cite a breakdown in collaboration: 58% of school counselors say students are having trouble collaborating with peers while concurrently suffering from increased conflicts with friends, lower self-esteem, and increased anxiety and depression. So, as media outlets, school counselors, and parents raise an alarm about the state of young people’s mental health, how can we respond as teachers?

One answer might be looking to rebuild a sense of community in our classrooms through collaboration – namely, peer response. Collaborative learning is not a new idea, but it may be more important than ever to teach students how to connect with one another, especially through sharing their writing. This can apply to any stage of writing: brainstorming, drafting, revising, and presenting final work. Each stage of the writing process can teach students valuable ways of communicating with each other in different situations – how to be supportive, how to be critical constructively, and even how to hear feedback without taking offense. Teachers can create lessons that model good and bad ways of responding to help students see this in action – and maybe lead to some much-needed, shared laughs around styles of feedback that are clearly not effective.

Just as constructive response needs to be modeled and taught, so does good teamwork. Dr. Oliver Dreon advocates developing peer response skills with a growth mindset. He explains how he has students form groups to discuss the qualities of good team members. They tend to use descriptors like trustworthy, respectful, dedicated, and dependable. He asks them whether these are fixed qualities or can be learned and developed, and his students generally agree that teamwork skills can be developed with hard work. This has motivated them to resolve issues in ways that support one another’s growth. As students practice effective teamwork, teachers can assess how both groups and individuals within those groups are progressing in their collaboration skills. Dreon recommends periodically using a Teamwork Value Rubric to monitor how peers are interacting and to design feedback that helps them function more effectively.

One simple way to build belonging and connection in the classroom is by providing activities that focus on shared interests. Since many of us already appreciate the value of providing choice for students, we can offer students choices in ways to group themselves around shared interests. These interests can be content-related (e.g. have students group by which character in a story they want to analyze, or which topic they want to research), or they can be entirely social and personal (e.g. have students group by their favorite color, song, or what kind of pet they have).

Writing itself is our best tool to help bring students come out of their shells and back into the classroom community. In "Invitations to a Writer's Life," Robert Brooke writes, “Discussion of ideas . . . creates a context where the writer’s ideas have social value” (Brooke, 2018, p. 185). Peer response and small groups provide forums where every student feels noticed and valuable. Elyse Eidman-Aadahl of the National Writing Project says about the educational benefits of exposure and peer response: “So much of learning to write comes from learning how your writing comes across to an audience.”

Students can increase their coping skills by giving and receiving constructive criticism, which teaches them communication skills and builds empathy. Sharing writing increases the ability to relate to and understand others and to feel understood through the writing that you share. If students are anxious and insecure coming out of the pandemic, opportunities to write down feelings and share them with peers can be a stepping stone toward rebuilding interpersonal relationships.

Brooke talks about writers needing time, ownership, response, and exposure. We need to carve out time in our classrooms for interpersonal connection. MIT’s peer review writing model emphasizes the fact that, “Nobody writes alone. Nobody finishes work alone” (MIT 2017). We can help students regain a sense of control over their lives, which was stripped away in the pandemic, by teaching them ownership over their writing, revision, and learning habits. We can provide opportunities for response and exposure within group writing activities, projects, and presentations.

As we recover healthy communication and teamwork in our classrooms, we can rebuild a real sense of community. The fracturing we are seeing in relationships in the classroom goes all the way up to the institutional level. The sense of alienation that students are feeling toward one another can be seen institutionally in schools’ retention challenges. Students aren’t feeling like they belong in school. Colleges and specialized programs are experiencing upsetting reductions in enrollment. This is where we as writing teachers and directors of writing centers can really step up to help. Peer review, peer groups, writing groups, and small group work can all provide essential support to students desperately needing to feel a sense of belonging again.

#pandemic #education #studentsuccess #peerresponse #writingcenters #collaboration #collaborativelearning #teenmentalhealth #socialemotionallearning #schoolretention #community #buildingcommunity