Bugs for Lunch: Collaborative WritingRosemarie Martens

Marist College

Introduction

• Collaborative writing may be defined as the joint production or the coauthoring of a text by two or more writers.

• Collaborative groups draw upon the strengths of all their members.

• Although one student may be stronger in critical thinking skills, another may excel in organizing.

• By working together students learn from one another in various ways as they complete assigned tasks.

Purpose• Writing is a complex and open-ended

task; with multiple authors, this adds to the complexity.

• The acts of collaboration: establishing an agenda or goal of the collaboration effort, identifying writing tasks and dividing those tasks among group members, communicating ideas, and managing conflict.

• Collaborative writing requires effective communication between members of the writing group.

• Communication and writing are skills that are significant and prevalent in everyday life collaborative writing combines the two into the classroom.

• Used throughout countless occupations: engineering, business, politics, architecture, etc.

• This ties to the common core in several senses

Methods• Materials that will be used in the

model• Reading Passage “Bug Bites” with

student’s mark ups, etc.• Two large sheets of loose leaf paper

to be used for the collaboratively developed graphic organizer and the collaborative introduction of the argumentative letter

• Loose leaf for individual argumentative body and conclusion to the argumentative letter

Results

• A completed collaborative graphic organizer

• A completed individual graphic organizer

• A collaboratively written introduction to letter

• Video clips of both collaborative and individual work

Strategy1. Gathering important and useful info

from text and using that evidence as reasons for arguing to include bugs in the school lunch menu.

2. Modeling graphic organizer used during writing.

3. Collaborating with the student so student can work on collecting reasons for her argumentative piece of writing/ evidence from the text based on her notes.

4. Students and tutors join together and work collaboratively to fill in the graphic organizer.

5. Students work independently of tutors and write an introduction of the argumentative letter.

Conclusions• Student's contributions and

participation in both the graphic organizers and the intro paragraph served as forms of assessments for me because they allowed me to observe her ability to collaborate effectively with others, to assess her social skills, her critical thinking skills, etc. as all of these were brought to the collaborative discussion/ brainstorming.

• Her relevant and significantly valued input provided me with the evaluation I needed in order to assess her comprehension of the topic assigned to her and check for understanding.

• The collaborative writing exercise was effective in terms of having students work on their communication skills, critical thinking skills (again going back to when I said collaborative writing is writing and communication intertwined.

• I wish to implement such collaborative exercises into my classroom because I believe it adds a great dimension and dynamic to the classroom that is absent without student's cooperation and teamwork.

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