Proposes combining peer-response exercises from Peter Elbow and Pat Belanoff's book "Sharing and Responding" with the series of written peer critiques in Kenneth Bruffee's "A Short Course in Writing." Argues that these types of peer criticism work best in tandem in the collaborative classroom, capturing the struggle between individual expression…

A whole-class exercise used in college composition classes to demonstrate the writing process is described. The class works together to produce a collaborative paper, in rough draft, in one hour. Steps used to produce it include specification of topic, discussion of purpose and audience, prewriting for ideas, development of thesis and outline,…

Provides three teaching strategies that integrate technology into the curriculum: inductive teaching, cooperative learning, and mnemonics. (MG)

Describes a cross-county writing project involving a third-grade class and high school drama students. The third graders write character sketches and send them to the drama students, who write a play using the characters. The high school students then produce the play for the elementary students, complete with costumes, makeup, and scenery. (TJQ)

Offers a view of writing as a process involving three forms of collaboration: coauthoring, workshopping, and knowledge making. Offers guidelines for designing courses in which writing is consciously, deliberately collaborative in all three of the realms identified. (MG)

This report describes a program for motivating reluctant writers. The targeted population consisted of one fourth-grade and four fifth-grade classrooms in three elementary schools. All three schools were located in the western suburbs of Chicago, Illinois. The problems of reluctant writers were documented with timed writing samples, student and…

This practicum was aimed at increasing children's abilities to use the computer through word processing activities. Most of the activities involved children working in cooperative groups. Another objective of the practicum was to incorporate the computer into the language arts area. A third objective was to effectively use a single computer beyond…

The University of Wyoming English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) program replaced a laboratory drill with a weekly, one-hour writing tutorial (WT) in which small groups of ESL students meet with a writing tutor. The role of the WT in community building and developing writing and oral skills is described, along with sample questions for a WT group.…

Plain talk is the cornerstone for creating a classroom atmosphere in which students want to learn to improve their writing. As much as possible, the jargon and technical terminology of the profession of English should be eliminated. Teachers will know what level of language to use if they determine the nature of their audience. Teachers have to…

Discusses the rationale and attributes of the whole-language approach and applies it to secondary social studies instruction. Describes assessment strategies used with the whole-language approach and maintains that evaluation of student writing helps prepare them for appraisal in the workplace. (CFR)

A middle school teacher describes the process by which she discovered a collaborative approach to teaching writing to a class including English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) students. To create a meaningful writing experience, she had students prepare a personal narrative, starting by having the class generate endings to the sentence beginning "I'll…

A study followed ten limited-English-proficient (LEP) community college students who were taught English largely using a cooperative learning approach. For four months, the students worked together using brainstorming techniques and collaborative reading and writing tasks. Task emphasis was on development of thinking skills through collaboration…

This volume is a collection of papers focused on a single theme, cooperative learning, written by classroom teachers of varying experience levels. This book introduces cooperative learning and gives examples of cooperative learning activities, units, and systems created by teachers in Japan, The United States, and Canada, who are currently using…

Asserts that social studies is an integrated field of study that calls for organizing the curriculum in a holistic manner. Maintains that the whole-language movement, which involves thinking about reading and writing as integrated, reciprocal processes, forms a natural partnership with social studies instruction. (CFR)

Communicative language teaching (CLT) is compatible with cooperative learning as both promote interaction through peer exchange. Cooperative education can take group work one step further and should therefore be incorporated into English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) writing classrooms. In English writing classes in a Japanese junior college, formal…