The Missing Link: Peer Conferencing in Civics Education

Abstract

This article describes a method—Collaborative Civics Conference Protocol (3CP)—that teachers can use with any civics education program to engage students in meaningful collaborative assessment of each others’ thinking and writing and to make connections between civics activities and essential social studies content. Borrowing from the Writer's Workshop model and Seidel et al.'s (1997) peer conference protocol, 3CP provides teachers with a procedure to guide their students through substantive conversations about the process of civic engagement, as well as how their projects connect to the big ideas in history, geography, economics, and civics content. Similar to writer's workshop, 3CP compels students to take responsibility for their own learning and for contributing to the learning of their classmates. An essential component of the model, peer conferencing engages students as critical friends who share their thinking, planning, and writing who then give, receive, and react to feedback from their classmates.