Stop Trying to Fix Students' Writing and Do This Instead (Writing Wednesday)

I'm at the Quoddy Writing Retreat in Lubec, Maine, this week, working alongside Ralph Fletcher and Georgia Heard and a room full of writers on completely different projects. Yesterday they gave us three prompts to bring into our response groups each day, and I'm sharing them here because every teacher facilitating peer feedback in a classroom can use these too.

"This seems to be about..." "I really connected to the part where..." "I wanted to know more about..." These three prompts pull meaning from a writer's work instead of jumping straight to fixing it. That shift matters for how writers apply feedback during peer response time, and it builds real connection instead of surface-level editing comments. These three prompts will change how your students talk to each other about their work.

I also want to put a book on your radar: Valerie Bolling's book, Goal Setting in the Writing Classroom, released in 2025. Chapter Four highlights peer feedback and critique groups, and I'm obsessed with it right now.

Chapters:
0:00 Writing Wednesday from the Quoddy Writing Retreat
0:12 Meet the facilitators: Ralph Fletcher and Georgia Heard
0:25 Three prompts for response groups
0:50 Why these prompts pull meaning instead of fixing writing
1:05 Book recommendation: Goal Setting in the Writing Classroom by Valerie Bolling
1:20 Chapter Four: peer feedback and critique groups
1:30 Sign-off

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