Collaboration in the Composition Class

This is my first semester to bring active learning into my composition classes. Although I've taught composition for most of my career, I haven't taught it in the last three years, and so on my return to the composition classroom I'm trying to incorporate some of the collaboration that has worked in my literature classes. For example, my first and second set of prompts asked each of my four groups of students to analyze the essays they were assigned to read, each group being asked to look at a different rhetorical point. The third set of prompts gave each group a short list of sources to arrange into a works cited list and the fourth set has asked them to each paraphrase a quotation I supply them. Of course, eventually we'll be trying the old standby, peer review, which for me has only been marginally successful in the past. But I'm hoping that as the students have become accustomed to working together in their groups before we arrive at that exercise, that they will be more comfortable, if not confident, about responding to each other's writing.