Describes a collaborative writing assignment which features a series of interconnected business messages arising out of a case study and including inhouse memos and an analytical report. Shows how the design of a collaborative writing assignment can foster creative rather than debilitative tension. (RS)

Describes the "Numbers Game"--a collaborative simulation to prepare students for participation in a full collaborative writing project. (RS)

Describes a second-grade class project in which students wrote a fictional biography in response to several books read aloud to them. Enumerates the 9 steps in the process, and presents selections (chapters 1 and 10) from the book "The Man in the Walnut Shell." (SR)

Describes the variables for designing and maintaining writing groups within classroom settings. Advocates the use of writing groups. Provides outline of which structures are possible, what training is advisable, and what modifications can be made in view of changing class dynamics. (HB)

Details a unit of study in a seventh-grade English class based on collaborative story-writing activities. Describes how the unit, based on a mystery surrounding a fictitious character called "Admiral Brundage," uses drama, argument, and collaboration to improve students' thinking and writing skills. (HB)

Provides brief accounts of how two writing instructors integrated simultaneous networked writing into their classrooms. Presents actual excerpts from the writing dialogs produced by students. (HB)

Discusses a course on shared-document writing in which students indicate that they value the time allowed to coordinate groups and to understand and complete assignments. Asserts that structuring the course necessitates assigning work relating to a single topic and providing choices, including a voice in group formation and evaluation. (PRA)

Describes the experiences of the participants in a graduate course called "Research in Written Composition" that nurtured the exchange of writing among teacher and students. Narrates the experience of one student and the instructor as a record of an empowering relationship and presents numerous excerpts of their journal writing. (HB)

States that service learning educates students to volunteer their expertise for the benefit of society. Suggests that teachers of business and technical writing can apply this pedagogy by assigning students to write for nonprofits. Describes service learning's origins; proposes a rationale for it; explains sequential projects and teaching methods…

Growth into literacy occurs most effectively with the engagement of the learner. The question is therefore: what motivates learners to sustain them through the struggle to attain literacy? In this aspect of literacy education, "lifewriting" can be a most powerful medium. Basic to all of the lifewriting programs described in the text,…

A 1991 survey questioned 61 teachers on the ways they were using collaborative learning to teach composition. Comparisons with a 1988 survey showed that the biggest increase was in the use of collaborative drafting strategies. Increases also occurred in focusing, prewriting, and editing, and there were slight decreases in revision and…

This document consists of the first three issues of a newsletter written by the members of the Making Thinking Visible Project. The first newsletter describes collaborative planning as it related to writing, discusses school projects using collaborative planning, presents a dialogue between two students using the process, and compares…

Elementary school students are unfamiliar with the process of writing a report on an assigned topic. One strategy for rectifying this is to have students compose reports in groups. Group compositions are a collaborative effort to prepare a piece of writing whereby students in either large or small groups work through the writing process together…

Although benefits and problems in collaborative learning, as well as techniques for facilitating it, have been extensively discussed in recent publications on composition teaching, few detailed descriptions of actual classroom uses of collaborative learning have been published. In an innovative one-term writing course, taught at the Chinese…

Describes one technical writing teacher's use of group writing projects in which students write and present a marketing report of a product they have invented. Points out that such projects teach students valuable skills in group dynamics, as well as technical writing skills. (ARH)