How effective was the two types of workshops for the literacy narrative and propsal essay?

I am not a fan of peer reviews because I know myself, I really am not sure what is wrong with someone elses paper, unless it is a major problem. The work shops would be more effective it was to a person of higher education and had an interest in writing. We as a whole just would like to read the papers and see what it is about, not what is wrong with it. Which also means that we are afraid of commenting to harshly about anothers piece. All in all, I think when we did workshops as a class, there was more discussions of everyones papers indiviually.