5 collaborative learning options
to improve development of writing skills

In the rush to incorporate team collaboration in the classroom so they can say they are "helping students develop 21st century skills," teachers may fall back on team activities they learned in the 20th century.

Wise writing teachers, however, look at all their collaborative classroom options.

Why use just a team-building activity when you could use collaboration techniques that promote achievement of several of your annual objectives?

In the writing classroom, collaborative activities can be used to teach writing skills at five levels. At the most basic level, students need to know very little about writing to help each other. At the highest level, considerable writing skill is required.

To get the greatest benefits of teamwork in your classroom, match the collaboration technique to your students' writing skills level.

1. Novice level: peer coaching

In peer coaching, one student is not the teacher or tutor for the other. Though they may have different strengths and weaknesses, the students generally at the same level.

Peer coaches hold each other accountable for doing assigned work.

For students to coach each other, all they need initially is a series of questions that you supply. As questioners get comfortable with coaching, they will be able to put the questions in their own words.

Questioners do not have to know the correct answers. The stress is on the respondent having an answer that sounds reasonable. You need to train and encourage students to follow up on anything they hear that doesn't make sense or isn't clear to them.

Peer coaching is ideal collaborative learning tool for helping students use and memorize writing strategies so eventually they can use the strategies unaided. In effect, the collaborative learning acts as scaffolding for teaching writing strategies.

This is not memory work in the same sense that learning the names of the 50 American state capitols is memory work. This is more like learning fingering for playing the flute.

Peer coaching is the best collaborative learning technique for beginning and struggling writers for several reasons:

• Peer coaching does not require advanced writing skills.

• Feedback at the planning stage can produce significant improvement in writing content.

• Compared to other peer assisted learning strategies, peer coaching offers relatively few opportunities for criticism and bullying.

Read a sales pitch for my peer coaching collaborative learning product Talk It Out.

2. Peer tutoring

Peer tutoring matches one student with a greater knowledge or skill with one with a lesser amount of knowledge or skill in that particular area.

In such collaborative learning, the student tutor substitutes for the teacher. Peer tutoring is peer-mediated instruction.

Classroom peer tutoring is not a procedure I recommend for classes of beginning or struggling writers. First, you must students must know the material themselves and be able share it with others. Finding those students can be tricky.

Secondly, other students must be willing to work with the peer tutors. If the good student is not liked or respected, the peer tutoring program can bomb.

In my experience, peer tutoring is best kept for some other part of your curriculum than teaching writing.

3. Peer review

A fairly common type of collaborative learning in writing classes is peer review. Ideally, students responding to the same assignment exchange papers.

The peer reviewer's job is to get the writer to explain more clearly any parts of the paper the reader found confusing or did not understand. Peers also should alert their partners to assignment directions the writer overlooked.

Peer review is a poor collaborative technique for immature students (regardless of age) or for students who aren't competent writers. The not-yet-competent writers have trouble enough finding their pencils, let alone doing reviews for other students.

However, if you are willing to put in some time training students, peer review can provide your competent writers with help to repair weaknesses in five areas of their papers.

4. Peer editing

In peer editing, students exchange and actually edit each other's papers. Like peer tutoring, it requires knowledge and skill on the part of the editor.

Peer editing may be useful to the student whose work is being edited. I'm not sure how much value peer editing has in developing a student's ability to edit his/her own work.

Like peer tutoring, peer editing can be an emotional minefield for students. That alone is reason enough for me to avoid peer editing in my classes. I'll leave it to graduate school writing programs where students should have both skills and maturity to handle it.

5. Collaborative writing

Collaborative writing can be a form of peer assisted learning — or a form of self-destructive behavior. Everything that can go wrong in a single student's paper is multiplied by a factor of the number of students in the writing group.

Asking students to produce a single group paper using a writing process that relies on rewriting and revision is doomed to failure.

A writing process like the one I recommend, which begins with a working thesis and writing skeleton™, has a reasonable chance of success if all students can use those tools and the associated strategies on their own.

Your best chance of success with beginning writers is to have them collaborate in content development but have each student write his or her own paper.

For example, if your writing prompt is about how authors use foreshadowing, the prompt might require students work in groups to come up with a list of examples of authors' use of foreshadowing.

Using collaborative learning in this way lets students become comfortable with teamwork without requiring them to learn to write collaboratively before they have mastered writing individually. Incidentally, this also is typical team collaboration practice when a paper has to be written by a workplace committee.

Learn how collaborative learning activities provide formative evaluation of students' progress.