TAG: Peer Writing Conferences

Students need peer-to-peer writing conferences. When done well, they allow our student writers to gain insight from peers on their writing while it is being crafted, and use this to guide their next steps. While feedback from teachers is important, feedback from peers can be powerful, allow a variety of perspectives, and be more instantaneous than what a single teacher can provide.

I love using the TAG conference as a structure for peer-to-peer writing feedback.

(Note: Although I found it floating somewhere on the internet, I believe the idea originally came from Lori Jamison Rog & Paul Kropp in The Write Genre.)

Before introducing the TAG structure, I frequently heard low level, weak and brief peer-to-peer feedback, like “I like your ideas” or “This is good”. Since introducing TAG, my students more confident in providing more meaningful, thoughtful feedback, and most student writers LOVE having the uninterrupted attention of someone else reading their writing and discussing it in a familiar and safe way.

I have watched students go from resisting peer writing conferences to jumping at the chance to participate.

How do TAG conferences work?

After reading or listening to the piece of writing in question, the TAG conference model directs students to give feedback to the writer through four steps:

Tell what you like about their work.
Ask questions.
Give suggestions.
With my students, I add a step after this:
Writer’s Goal.

After this discussion, both students sign off on what has been said and the writer uses the conference to guide their next steps.

In this post I’m sharing a template I created for students to document discussion as they work through the TAG conference together. In my class, the writer sticks it in their book alongside the writing piece to refer back to when they return to revising their piece, and we discuss it in teacher-student writing conferences. I also include a similar template that provides prompts for verbal (rather than written) feedback.

I sometimes direct students to participate in a TAG conference with a specific focus. For example (since we use the 6+1 Traits to support writing at our school) I might ask students to participate in a TAG conference on the trait of Ideas, or perhaps more specifically on using accurate, credible details. I might choose this focus based on a need I see across the class or individual, or might ask the whole class to do a TAG conference based on our current focus.

How do I introduce TAG conferences?

To kick TAG conferences off with a new group of students, I model it!

While the class observes, a student gives me feedback on a piece of my own writing using the TAG prompts.
With the student’s permission, I do the same for a piece of their work. This allows me to demonstrate a thinkaloud of how I both receive and provide feedback within this structure.
When I confer with students, I try to stick to the TAG conference structure to: a) provide continued opportunities to model the process, and b) continue using a safe and familiar structure to have conversations about a student author’s work.

Like most other useful teaching tools, the TAG conferences have to become a routine that is an ongoing part of our class work. Initially student feedback is varied and quite often a little weak, but after continued practice using this tool it becomes more effective as students hone their skills.