Begun in the summer of 2005, the Writing Initiative Peer Fellows Program hopes to help both students and faculty in Writing Intensive courses. Professors teaching small Writing Intensive classes without TAs can ask to work with Peer Fellows. You will be assigned 1 Fellow per 10-15 students. Fellows contract to work an average of three hours a week at $8 per hour. Student participation with a Fellow and expected levels of participation must be spelled out in the syllabus as a graded part of the course. A sample syllabus is available from Writing Initiative staff. In the model class, students submit drafts of their first and last papers to Fellows two weeks before the final due date. Fellows read the papers carefully and discuss revision options and strategies in one-on-one meetings with each writer. Peer Fellows are not editors; they do not rewrite the papers or correct all the grammar or mechanical problems. Instead, while they may comment on those issues, their primary focus is on global issues of assignment criteria, organization, development, and thesis. Peer Fellows can never grade or predict grades on student work, but they can offer students suggestions based on the professor’s goals for the writing assignments. The student revises the paper accordingly and hands in both the final version and the earlier draft with the Fellow's comments to the professor on the final due date. Fellows are also available on a limited basis to lead in class writing workshops, and they often make themselves available to students for optional conferences on the other writing assignments for the class.

Who are the Fellows:

The Peer Fellows are multidisciplinary upper-level undergraduates carefully selected and trained to assist faculty in their Writing Intensive courses. Many come from the honors program, and all have completed the university writing requirement. Peer Fellows are chosen based on their demonstrated writing ability and interest in helping other students with their writing process. They undergo rigorous training, in which they read recent work from composition studies, practice commenting on student drafts, conduct original research on writers and writing, and reflect on their own experiences as writers and tutors. More information about their training can be found in the Peer Fellows handbook. In addition, they meet weekly with the Writing Initiative Office to discuss their progress in your course. Peer Fellows are writing generalists, not specialists, who can offer valuable peer modeling of the writing process, both in and out of class to students in Writing Intensive courses.

How faculty benefit:

Fellows require students to be accountable for their writing in a drafted form much earlier than they might have been without Fellows, which means that students have more time for revision.  Fellows provide feedback on writing in the draft stage, so the overall quality of the writing is generally much better. Also, because Fellows provide faculty with conference reports about students in the drafting stage, faculty can often discover the kinds of problems and concerns their students have early enough to make a difference. In addition, some faculty members say that working with Fellows saves them time grading because they can concentrate more on issues of course content (as Fellows have already talked with students about matters of structure and organization). Finally, several professors who have worked with Fellows have noted that the experience has led them to clarify their goals and expectations for students' written work and even to revise their own assignments.