An instructor teaching professional writing found that groups collaborating on the final project required for the course, the creation of a brochure, experienced considerable infighting and tension. In reexamining his course objectives, he confirmed his sense that indeed collaboration in one form or another is inevitable in American professional life today: workshopping, coauthoring, knowledge making. Patient diagnosis, private or corporate law, project management--all are becoming more collaborative, if they were not inherently so before. So how does the instructor help students work through the difficulties of consensus building? Greg Myers suggests that "consensus cannot be known without its opposite"--dissensus. A revision of the course objectives yielded the following: (1) to give students the opportunity to collaborate with one another on a major project; (2) to allow them the flexibility to find a model that works for their group; (3) to celebrate dissensus by allowing it to occur and by preparing students for handling it. Dissensus is then encouraged in several ways: through nongraded practice with small-group collaboration early in the semester; through instruction and practice in identifying group dynamics and roles. Giving students a framework of the roles people fall into in groups, such as the "encouragers," the "feeling expressers," the "compromisers," and the "gatekeepers," helps them work through difficulties later. K. Houp and T. Pearsall's "Reporting Technical Information" offers a good framework for helping the group accomplish the set task. (TB)