Helen Reed - Blog Post 4 - Using Critical Friends

During my PBL projects, I did not have much success in using the Critical Friends protocol. This was the result from a few things; time, students not taking it seriously, and me not doing a good of enough job explaining it. But, after reading and hearing about you all talk about how critical friends worked for you, I wanted to give it another try. Since I had finished my Spring PBL I decided to use the Critical Friends protocol with my student's writing.

In the middle of our Westward Expansion unit, we began reading the novel, Dear Levi. This novel is written in the form of letters. Austin writes letters to his brother, Levi, who had to stay back on the east coast, telling him all about his adventure west. We used this novel as a mentor text to help us write our own letters west. The students got to be creative in their writing by making up what was going to happen on their journey, but had to format their writing in the form of a letter and include realistic events that could happen while traveling out west.

The students really took to this writing and were so excited to read and share their writings. It got to the point where everyone wanted to read everyone's story, instead of continue to write their own. That's where I decided to try Critical Friends. I asked the students, 'Who would be willing to let the entire class read their story?' Almost everyone's hands went up. Then I asked, 'Who would be willing to let us offer feedback and make corrections to your writing, in order to make it better?' Only a few hands went down. And with that, I knew Critical Friends would be more successful this time. I asked the students to choose one letter they had written that they wanted to make better. I would copy their writing from their notebook and project it onto the board to allow the class to read and offer feedback on. We reviewed the procedures for critical friends and then did our first example.

We read through through the first example then gave our 'I likes'. Naturally, the students mentioned parts they liked related to the content of the writing; 'I like how you included different hardships experienced along the trail. I like how you told us the reason you were traveling out west.' When we transitioned to the 'I wonders', I had to remind the students to again focus on the content, and not on, 'I wonder if you can spell x word correctly.' The students did a good job with the 'I wonders', for example, 'I wonder if you can tell us how you escaped from the Indians, not just tell us that you left when you saw them. I wonder if you can tell us how this person died on the trail.' This feedback was encouraging to me that the students were understanding how critical friends should work and about the content related to Social Studies that we had learned about. After the likes and wonders, I gave the student the opportunity to respond to their writing. The final part we added to Critical Friends was more of peer editing. The student whose writing we were reading told us that they knew they spelled some things wrong and wanted help on that too. So, their classmates readily volunteered to help them. Since I had projected their writing on the board, the students could come up to the board and make edits. The students made corrections with everything from capitalization, punctuation, grammar, word usage, to correcting the letter formatting. While all these corrections were taking place, the student whose writing it was was making corrections in their notebook. While not every student who participated in Critical Friends enjoyed watching their writing be marked up by their classmates, they were excited to share their writing, and know that it was indeed better after receiving feedback.

As a class we probably had seven or eight students participate in Critical Friends throughout the week. The students were motivated to do their best because they wanted to share what they had written and make it the best they possibly could. I am happy that I gave Critical Friends another shot and will continue to use this protocol with writing in the future, and try it again with PBL.