Developing effective teamwork
Takes real work by the writing teacher

To achieve effective teamwork — effective in terms of your class objectives — the first thing you must do is match a collaborative learning activity to your teaching situation.

In deciding on a team activity to use in teaching writing, consider:

• The students' degree of writing competence.

• The return on investment for your time.

• Team creation challenges

• Activity logistics.

We'll take a quick look at each of these.

Students' writing competence level.

If individual team members can't climb, they are not going to be a significant help in getting the team up a tree.

Success in getting effective teamwork from Josh and Caitlin on a writing task depends a great deal on whether their individual levels of writing skill fit the team's task. As the teacher, it's your job to make sure the two match.

With a little training and a script you provide, novice writers can provide formative assessment in the guise of peer coaching to other novices to help them prepare to write. Students don't need to have good writing skills to help each other in the pre-composition stages of the writing process.

Having students giving formative assessment feedback on drafts not yet revised or edited compositions works best with students who are competent writers. You can choose peer conferencing (a more palatable term for what is traditionally called peer review) or peer editing.

Return on your investment.

Effective teamwork doesn't just happen; effective collaboration techniques must be learned. You have to set up the learning environment so that learning can occur.

Researchers at the University of Leicester (2010) showed that two people can learn to cooperate with each other intuitively. They don't need to be taught teamwork skills. They don't even need to have an conscious intention to cooperate. (My Talk It Out materials build on the intuitive cooperation between pairs of students.)

However, when the group consists of three or more individuals, the cooperation doesn't just happen: some conscious effort is required to produce an effective team of three or more members.

The prep work, support, and supervision of a group collaborative activity takes longer than you think it will. I have never found the learning produced by a one-time group activity to be worth the time the activity required.

My rule of thumb is that I need to use a full class period group activity for at least half the major course assignments for the learning produced to equal the value of the time the activity requires.

Team creation challenges

Learning activities in which students provide formative assessment to one another present some logistic challenges for teachers.

It is unwise to let students choose their partners or teammates. Assigning teams requires you to not only consider the students' strengths and weaknesses as writers — you don't want them badly mismatched — but also their personalities and peer group affiliations.

You also have to be prepared to shuffle teams if you see some are not working well.

Activity logistics

Finally, you have to make sure students have time to work together, either in class or outside, if you expect students to do effective teamwork.

If you cannot arrange for all students to meet with their partners or teams, it is not fair to impose a collaborative requirement.