Examines three classroom techniques for facilitating actor/filmmaker collaborative scriptwriting situations: improvisation, "contentless scenes" used to develop notions of subtext, and beat analyses (breaking scripts into character beats) used by directors to create characters that come alive on the screen. (SR)

Describes a process for evaluating technical writing students who are working in groups. Discusses task sheets, progress reports, evaluation forms, and the final individual evaluation. (PRA)

Questions the effectiveness of incorporating collaboration into classrooms and expecting instant results. Discusses the highly individualistic pedagogy that students have already been steeped in. Calls for practical measures and instruction in collaborative skills which will foster collaborative learning. (HB)

Presents a framework for third-grade writers and their partners called L.A.M.P. (Listening, Asking questions, Making suggestions, and Positive comments). Notes that the author uses this collaborative planning exercise periodically, not for every writing piece. (RS)

Designed to help teachers develop a collaborative writing community in the intermediate grade classroom, this teacher's resource and support package gives teachers what they need to apply process writing principles to five of the most popular student writing forms or genres ("memorable moments,""interesting…

Discusses problems of collaborative writing. Introduces the "collage" as a teaching activity and lays out directions for its use. Suggests several methods for helping solo writers get comfortable collaborating with other writers and improve their solo writing. Attempts to make collaborative writing easier, more inviting, but more complex, and…

Considers how many students walk into the class with an array of technical communicating perspectives that open the door for practical experiences. Believes that a technical communicator employs the ethnographic process for the purpose of creating technical documents. Presents an ethnographic framed assignment that requires a collaboratively…

An instructor teaching professional writing found that groups collaborating on the final project required for the course, the creation of a brochure, experienced considerable infighting and tension. In reexamining his course objectives, he confirmed his sense that indeed collaboration in one form or another is inevitable in American professional…

Students must reconsider the nature of composing and their identities as writers when working on a jointly authored piece of writing, such as a two-page report on a particular area in a university library. Looking at the ways workshop groups interact to produce a piece of collaborative writing and a joint oral presentation offers insight into the…

Explores the concept of peer writing groups by reviewing research and offering a plan for preparing, training, monitoring, and evaluating the peer writing group. (SD)

Outlines a technical writing course in which the students collaborate in writing a technical writing handbook. The course includes traditional lectures as well as small and large group work on various aspects of writing the handbook. (TJ)

Examines the dynamics of reading, writing and telling stories. Argues that working collaboratively can motivate writers in ways which encourage them to redraft their work purposefully and explicitly in pursuit of particular creative effects. Exemplifies ways in which knowledge about language at word, sentence and whole text level can effectively…

Describes how to conduct a collaborative group story-writing session with preschool children and encourage the creativity of the group. (MM)

Describes how a class of 13 academically average high school students, inspired by an earlier article in this journal, collaboratively wrote a story. Notes that the students continued to revise their story even after it came back from the printers. (RS)

Presents several activities for an "interactive" classroom, including improvisation, role-playing, and informal discussions of literature. Notes that all suggested activities provide a context for language use and use students' talk as a vehicle for learning in a wide variety of communication situations, including reading and writing.…