This study was situated at Mountain Middle School (Pseudonym). Students at Mountain Middle School often engage in collaborative compositions embedded within week-long multidisciplinary and multiage units of study called Odysseys. These units of study and the collaborative composition projects are classified as formal cooperative learning. Johnson…

Writing groups have the potential to be positive academic communities, but often become problematic spaces where students go to get their writing "fixed." In this article, the authors draw on literature from peer response groups as well as social justice pedagogies to explore how teachers might develop these groups as spaces for student…

All young people have stories to tell. Yet when children and teens declare that they hate writing or are too embarrassed to admit they like it, elevating their voices becomes challenging. It is urgent that educators, policy makers, youth development workers and leaders, and philanthropists work together to find a way. In the land of free speech,…

The authors showcase the use of DocuViz, an information visualization tool, as a means to support middle school students' online synchronous collaborative writing. The purpose of this study was to explore writing outcomes when students write in groups and independently. Providing students with a tool to help them understand their individual…

This study aimed at investigating the impact of problem-based learning (PBL) on students' writing skills and the process of teaching and learning. An embedded mixed-method design was applied involving 41 seventh grade students of SMP Negeri 4 Denpasar. In this study, the quantitative data were students' writing skills which were collected through…

Flipped classroom innovation has attracted the attention of English Language Teaching (ELT) researchers to examine its effectiveness. This inquiry, therefore, elaborates on the effect of flipping (i.e. reversing) individual and collaborative instruction using a "WhatsApp" application on the cohesive ability of English as a Foreign…

Providing students with the opportunity to generate new content and share it with a wide audience invites students to compose texts with the care and conviction that cannot be duplicated when writing solely for the teacher. This piece documents one teacher's effort to engage 99 eighth graders with an authentic writing opportunity: the…

Aim/Purpose: In this study, the authors examine how an online word processing tool can be used to encourage participation among students of different language backgrounds, including English Language Learners. To be exact, the paper discusses whether student participation in anonymous collaborative writing via Google Docs can lead to more…

Important to issues of writing instruction are the ways in which teachers, specifically those who teach in the discipline of language arts and English, understand and see themselves as writers. The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore how secondary English teachers positioned themselves and were positioned by others as writers through…

Narrates one teacher's move from high school to eighth-grade English. Describes a method for teaching middle school students how to write collaboratively. Provides details of writing assignments, units, and techniques successfully utilized, including publishing a teenage magazine. (HB)

Discusses the benefits of collaborative writing in a writing workshop and the value of a social cognitive approach to learning for middle school students. Examines a taped collaborative writing workshop to demonstrate themes of using exploratory talk to stimulate thinking, promoting conceptual understanding, internalizing language to gain…

Any science teacher who wants his or her students to be engaged in real science is going to engage them in real science writing. Writing in science should begin with clear, imaginative writing purposes and stimuli that are then scaffolded in such a way that students are able to find an organizational structure for their writing. Writing fluency is…