When working in small groups, begin by reading your piece out loud to your peer reviewers. Read the piece twice, pausing a few seconds between each reading, so that you listeners can hear it. After your second reading, ask each listener to tell you in their own words what they heard you getting at, trying to recall as much detail as they can. You might want to ask them to write the sayback down so that each offers you a sayback uninfluenced by the other. If you're working in a computer networked classroom, the saybacks can be written in an online discussion forum or into a file.
The Benefit
This form of feedback resembles the practice of repeating information to make sure we've gotten it right, something we do with phone numbers, travel directions, spellings of names, and so on. When you listeners say back to you what they hear in their own words, it tells you what they've heard, how they've processed it, and what they recall. That's why getting the say back in their own words becomes important; you don't want them to paraphrase consciously. If they do pick up on phrases you used, then you know those phrases have stuck. By reading to them twice, you know that what they say back is based on careful listening and recall, not reskimming the piece in an attempt to get everything you said into their sayback.
Using this Activity to Revise
The feedback--sayback--you receive from this activity lets you know which of your ideas are getting through; it points to strengths. Based on this knoweldge, you can build on these strengths. As you receive your sayback, place asterisks next to passages in your writing that connect directly to the type of sayback you are getting. Afterwards, compare the passages with asterisks to those without asterisks. Note such things as where they are in the piece, and how much emphasis or detail is associated with each passage. Did ideas that you intended to have more prominence have less? Are they overshadowed? If so, is it because you discovered something else more compelling? Do you want to switch your emphasis to that other thing or do you want to bolster that which is not as noticeable? Questions and observations like these, which grow from your listeners saying back to you what they heard and remembered, can help you re-see your writing, can help you imagine new paths for it, and your thinking, to take.