Collaborative writing playbook: an instructor's guide to designing writing projects for student teams

Collaborative Writing Playbook: An Instructor’s Guide to Designing Writing Projects for Student Teams supports writing across the curriculum by helping instructors overcome a key obstacle to assigning writing: the workload.

The Playbook is for instructors who would assign more writing in their courses if they could create meaningful assignments that complement course goals. The Playbook is for instructors who would assign collaborative writing if they could account for individual contributions to collaboratively written content and use assessment criteria consistent with course learning objectives.

Instructors can overcome the workload obstacles by identifying five learning objectives that writing and course content have in common: discipline-specific objectives for critical thinking, research, synthesis, genre/structure, and editing/peer review. By aligning writing objectives with course learning objectives, instructors can design writing projects, tasks, and peer review roles that support rather than distract from course content.

Including collaborative writing throughout a course makes meaningful collaboration much easier to achieve than making collaboration a temporary activity, which can disrupt everyone’s productivity. Joe Moses and Jason Tham present ideas for small and large activities that help instructors introduce collaboration at a pace that makes sense for them and sustains meaningful learning throughout a course.

Designed to support instructors who want to include writing-to-learn opportunities for their students, COLLABORATIVE WRITING PLAYBOOK has several unique features:

Practical tools for planning and promoting productive teamwork.
Roles for collaborative writing teammates that complement course-specific learning objectives.
Structured activities designed specifically to support teammate interdependence and accountability.
Templates for team charters, team planning, goal setting, and task coordination.
A versatile, five-part structure—defined by instructors according to their preferences—for designing and evaluating team projects.