Collaborative Writing in Your Classroom

Hello readers!! Welcome back to my literacy blog where I am covering some resources or an important topic in each of the four strands in the Ontario language curriculum!! The strand I will be covering this week is writing!! Writing is an essential portion of the language curriculum and yet when I searched some resource banks provided to us, I found that resources for teaching writing were much scarcer than those for reading and even media literacy! I hope I can share my opinions on an important writing topic with you during this blog and even show you some cool resources and applications for teaching writing!

The important issue that I would like to share with you all is collaborative writing and how that can be a hugely beneficial activity for you to engage in with your students. While the resources we looked at explored how collaborative writing between a teacher and their students can be impactful because the teacher can model strong writing and reviewing especially for their students, I also believe that collaborative writing between students and peers can be just as effective. When students write collaboratively with each other they can become more confident in their writing abilities because they can still share their ideas, but the responsibility does not fall on completely on their shoulders. Writing collaboratively also gives students the opportunity to revise their own and their peers' work. With some coaching, this can become an effective way to promote self-assessment.

BES Photos. Students writing collaboratively. wikipedia.com. Accessed on November 14, 2019. Retrieved https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_writing#/media/File:Two_students_practicing_collaborative_writing_in_the_classroom.jpg

Now how can you make collaborative writing work for you? A resource that shared an interesting way for peers to collaboratively write was from Digital Promise. The activity that they describe involves each student writing a portion of a story (maybe 1-3 sentences) before passing it along to the next student who must then pick up where they left off and continue the story by adding whatever they see fit. This is a great activity because it allows students to write collaboratively and creatively! It also offers them the opportunity to have ownership as a group over an activity done in class and the results can be quite goofy and silly which brings humour into a language class. I have implemented this activity with campers while running day camp with the Town of Newmarket and it has always been a great success! Bringing the focus back to the classroom, I see several different perspectives that students could take when engaging in this collaborative writing activity which is a curriculum expectation. Students could write fairy tales together (starting with “Once upon a time…”), persuasive pieces (You have to come try out…), or even news articles (We are receiving reports of…”) to name just a few examples!

Wikivisual. Example of the start of a fairy tail students could write collaboratively. wikihow.com. Accessed on November 14, 2019. Retrieved https://www.wikihow.com/Write-Fairy-Tales#/Image:Write-Fairy-Tales-Step-3-Version-3.jpg

As I mentioned in my opening, it can be challenging to find writing resources, especially ones that focus on collaborative writing, but a fantastic website is the National Writing Project and their article on 30 Ideas for Teaching Writing. I suggest you check it out because there are so many valuable activity ideas on their site, but I want to touch on one in particular that I have had experience and success implementing. The website calls it “using writing to improve relations among students” and I was able to successfully implement a strategy like it to bring a group of CITs (counsellors in training), who were unfamiliar with each other, closer together. I had them interact with each other was through letter writing. The CITs wrote questions they had about each other and then wrote back in reply, and then they wrote motivational letters to each other that they were to open on their first day as volunteer counsellors. As a teacher, I would suggest you read all the letters before handing them out to their recipients to ensure all the content is appropriate and positive.

lisbonlx. Letter template students could use. lisbonlx.com. Accessed on November 14, 2019. Retrieved http://www.lisbonlx.com/format/31/friendly-letter-format-heading.html

Thank you so much for reading my blog on writing! I hope it was able to get you thinking about collaborative writing in a positive light! I also hope that you can make use of the two websites linked above and that my activity suggestions at least sparked some ideas for how you can teach writing! See you next time!!