Our tips for others who wish to start their own collaborative writing group: have a common purpose and manageable goals, utilize people’s strengths and develop their weaknesses, listen to each other, have fun, be flexible but keep the momentum going with regular meetings, and support each other when work or other commitments peak. (p. 4)
Similarly, as educators, we find that collaborative writing helps us to become better teachers and supports our learning about teaching and literacy by exposing us to the thinking of our colleagues.
Collaborative writing helps us write better, develop our ideas, and think in new ways. We have found this to be true in our collaborative writing process. What we write together is often better than what we write alone. Our words are strengthened with input from others. It is a method of writing that helps us learn from each other and share our ideas in a public venue.
References
Axelrod, R. B., & Cooper, C.R. (2010). The St.
Martin's guide to writing (9th ed.). Boston,
MA: Bedford/St. Martin's.
Elbow, P. (1999). Using the collage for
collaborative writing. Composition Studies,
27(1), 7-14.
Hurst, B., Wilson, C., & Cramer, G. (2002).
Teachers writing together: A journey in
collaboration. The Missouri Reader, 26(2),
24-26.
Murray, D.M. (1982). Teaching the other self:
The writer’s first reader. National Council of
Teachers of English, 33(2), 140-147.
Ness, V., Duffy, K., McCallum, J., & Price, L.
(2014). Getting published: Reflections of a
collaborative writing group. Nurse
Education Today, 34(1), 1-5.
Wallace, R., Pearman, C., Wilson, C., & Hurst, B.
(2007). Writing for comprehension. Reading
Horizons, 48(1), 41-56.
When I taught an Applied Communications class that was little more than an English IV for seniors who did not want to write research papers or read Beowulf, the majority of my students were salt of the earth types who would more than likely work on a farm or in some sort of labor force after high school. I mostly had to convince my students they were not "dumb." It was a difficult concept for some of them to grasp because the modern school system basically conditions students to think if they do not take calculus and understand microbiology, then they are, by all rights, dumb. One of the ways I used to help them overcome this erroneous misconception was to run a podcast from my classroom.
I had the students create a how-to audio podcast describing how to execute some sort of task in which they felt proficient. As stated by John Hattie (2012), “...a precursor to learning is engagement in the learning”
(p.156); therefore, I created the subject of the podcast to be an area in which they already had interest and experience. The students researched this task, found outside sources, and then used them in the written portion of their final podcast scripts. Then they recorded their podcasts, which involved a completely different set of skills necessary to edit and record audio and publish it on iTunes. Without realizing it, they were writing a research paper
by Josh Cantrell
Tech Talk
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