Collaborative Writing
Overview
When peers are able to work together to plan, draft, edit, and revise during the Composition process, their writing quality improves. In collaborative writing, students gain autonomy of their writing and increase social engagement, which can stimulate Motivation. With appropriate structure, peer discussion, and feedback, collaborative writing can also improve students' Foundational Writing Skills, Vocabulary, Syntax, and Disciplinary Literacy.
Example: Use This Strategy in the Classroom
Watch as these students write a story together. For this type of collaborative writing activity, groups of students write and revise a story together before sharing it with the class.
Design It into Your Product
Videos are chosen as examples of strategies in action. These choices are not endorsements of the products or evidence of use of research to develop the feature.
See how Google Docs can support collaborative writing. Their features that enhance collaboration include the ability for students to comment on other's writing, track changes in suggestion mode, and have multiple people work on one document at the same time.
Additional Resources
Additional examples, research, and professional development. These resources are possible representations of this strategy, not endorsements.
Factors Supported by this Strategy
More Cooperative Learning Strategies
Students practice making and finding meaning in texts through book discussions moderated by teachers to varying degrees.
Flexible grouping is a classroom practice that temporarily places students together in given groups to work together, with the purpose of achieving a given learning goal or activity.
As students move through multimodal stations pertaining to a particular unit, the social and physical nature of the activity supports deeper understanding.
As students work with and process information by discussing, organizing, and sharing it together, they deepen their understanding.
When students provide constructive feedback on each other's work, they learn to give relevant suggestions, receive specific ways to improve their writing, and engage in Metacognition.
Having students teach their knowledge, skills, and understanding to their classmates strengthens learning and increases Motivation.
When students explain to others, they deepen their understanding and gain confidence in their learning.
Bringing students' every day literacy practice of texting into the classroom provides regular, low-stakes practice communicating with authentic audiences.
Think-pair-share encourages meaningful student discussion by allowing for extra processing time and multiple shares.
Writing conferences allow students to fully immerse, share, reflect, and receive feedback during the writing process, promoting Motivation for continuing the sometimes lengthy revision process that occurs in the upper grades.
