Collaborative Writing Playbook: An Instructor's Guide to Designing Writing Projects for Student Teams

by Joe Moses, Jason Tham

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781643172408
Publisher:	Parlor Press, LLC
Publication date:	02/27/2021
Series:	Collaborative Writing Playbook Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	167
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Joe Moses teaches collaborative writing, research, and project design in the Department of Writing Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. His co-written and co-edited scholarship appears in the Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Computers&Composition, Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization, The International Journal of Sociotechnology and Knowledge Development, and Connexions: International Professional Communication Journal.
Jason Tham (PhD, University of Minnesota) is Assistant Professor of Technical Communication and Rhetoric at Texas Tech University. He codirects the User Experience (UX) Lab and teaches courses in UX research, information design, and digital rhetorics. He is a Research Partner of the Digital Life Institute at Ontario Tech University. His current research interests are design thinking approaches in technical communication pedagogy and practice. Tham’s work has appeared in Technical Communication, Journal of Technical Writing&Communication, Computers and Composition, and IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, among other journals and edited volumes. He is also the author of Design Thinking in Technical Communication (2021, Routledge).

Table of Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Chapter overview

List of tables

List of figures

Introduction: Why collaborative writing matters

Chapter 1: What does a good collaborative writing project look like?

Chapter 2: How can collaborative writing support your course learning objectives?

Chapter 3: Collaborative writing roles and tasks for interdependent teamwork

Chapter 4: An interdependent learning environment for collaborative writing

Chapter 5: A writing process for interdependent collaboration

Chapter 6: Create a vision for collaborative writing

Final words

References

Keywords