An Argument Writing Battle Royale

Students don’t always like to spend a lot of time revising their writing. So, in the midst of creating an argument writing piece, I sought an engaging way for students to be more thoughtful about their revision.

After deciding how I would do this, I put students into groups of three and declared that they were teams.  They needed to help one another improve their writing to prepare what I dubbed the “Battle Royale.”

Students were hooked and took the role of giving and receiving peer feedback to heart.  Over the course of a class period, students read one another’s writing and gave feedback about both structure and content.  Students were listening carefully to one another and making many revisions to their work.

"Writing" by akrabat is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 

The next time we met, I gave students 10 more minutes to prepare by giving feedback and revising their writing.  They were then ready for the “Battle Royale.”

Each student was assigned two numbers.  The roll of a die determined which student would take a turn.  In separate turns, the student chose by the die copied the introduction, a body paragraph, or the conclusion of their writing and pasted to a designated spot in shared Google Slides.  Once all were pasted, all students read all examples and selected the one they felt was the strongest.  Whichever team had their paragraph chosen as the strongest overall won the round and rolled a die to determine how many points the round was worth.

We proceeded that way so that multiple examples of each type of paragraph were shared by each team and a winner was declared.

Students not only worked well together by giving feedback in their groups, but they also had multiple exposures to other students’ work.  Seeing so many examples gave them greater insight into how they might revise their work further (which was the next step).

Approaching feedback and revisions in this manner resulted in students improving their writing more than they would have if a peer had given feedback in a more traditional way.  So, I will not hesitate in using this approach again.


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If you have an effective way for peer  writing feedback or, if this post has generated some thoughts of your own, please share in the comments. I would appreciate hearing from you.