Working with Peer Groups in the Composition Classroom

Although group inquiry has, in the past ten years, become one of the many popular methods of teaching revision to undergraduates, we still know relatively little about it. Thom Hawkins, Kenneth Bruffee, Peter Elbow, and others have argued convincingly for the value of peer interaction during the writing process. 1 Still others, like Cassandra Book and Kathleen Galvin, have outlined how groups should interact and what roles individuals tend to play within groups.2 However, we still have very little that tells us, as writing instructors working with groups in our classrooms, what is actually happening when a group does not come together in the way we believe it should. My aim in this paper is not to argue the value of group inquiry for teaching writing. Francine Danis, in particular, has already argued that issue thoroughly, and those of us who use the method consistently enough to know are already convinced of its worth.3 What we do not know, however, is what we can do when the necessary interaction among members of the group simply is not there.