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See also the Sample Collaborative Tasks page in the Archive of Teaching Materials.
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The Acknowledgments Page
We know from reading the acknowledgments of published writers that consultation on work-in-progress is a respected tradition. I recommend requiring students to prepare an acknowledgments page to submit with all finished papers. Writing an acknowledgments page can help to teach intellectual honesty from a positive perspective. Students should note the help of instructors, classmates, friends, and family members who have commented on work-in-progress. I suggest that you prepare students for writing pages of acknowledgment by assigning them to read published versions, especially those written by the authors of their textbooks. Some fine examples of graceful and witty writing appear on published pages of acknowledgment. Reading some examples to your students makes at least two good points: 1) that sharing ideas helps to nurture ideas; 2) that even famous authors of all those closely printed pages are human beings who needed the reassurance of friends and colleagues while they were drafting their manuscripts.
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Collaborative Learning
Understanding the function of an acknowledgments page can free students to learn from their peers. In an article in the Harvard Educational Review (August, 1977), Nan Elsasser and Vera John- Steiner define collaborative learning as the "conscious and productive reliance upon groups in which learners confront and work through--orally and in writing--issues of significance to their lives." We are suggesting that students learn procedures to check in with each other. We are not suggesting that students co-author each other's papers. Instead we recommend that instructors create an environment that stimulates that of the academic community at large--a community made distinctive by the lively exchange of ideas.
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Kenneth Bruffee of Brooklyn College has produced the best theoretical and practical work on collaborative learning; particularly important is his book Collaborative Learning (Johns Hopkins, 1993). Below are just a few suggestions for using small group learning during the drafting process:
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The two most important points to remember are: - that you must provide a structure for student interactions; and
- that you must model the review process for your students.
If you simply ask students to read and comment on each other's work-in-progress, they will probably respond in one of three ways: savage, polyanna, or silent. Students need training before they can comment responsibly and effectively on each other's work. By distributing an essay from a previous semester (or from the Writing Program's archive), you can lead students through a model response simply by speaking aloud in relation to the paper as they follow along. Encourage students to describe their classmates' drafts before you permit them to say anything evaluative. One simple technique is to ask students to exchange drafts and then simply to summarize their classmate's paper. Create an atmosphere of reciprocity. Ask writers to comment on their own drafts before exchanging with peers. Writers should answer the following questions: - What stage is your draft in at this point? Are you still getting your thoughts together or are you further along in the process?
- What do you like best about your work at this stage? Least?
- What would you like readers to focus on at this stage? How can readers help you to reformulate, revise, or edit your work?
Writers can attach a discussion of these issues to their draft or they can talk over these matters with their peer reviewers. The peer reviewer then responds orally or in writing to the following three questions: - What do you think is the main idea of your classmate's draft?
- What do you like best about the draft? Least?
- How can you most effectively respond to your classmate's request for suggestions?
This exchange between classmates helps to establish an atmosphere of sharing between equals. Students are not then competing to find the most errors on each other's papers. Instead, students are learning to behave like writers by responding productively to each other's work.
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The Writing Folder
I suggest that students keep all written exercises and drafts in a single folder and that the students submit this folder along with the finished products that are ready for evaluation. You may find it useful to glance through the materials in this folder to gauge students' increasing understanding of writing processes and to assess the effort that each student is exerting. It is especially important for you to remind yourself of what peers or what you yourself have suggested on preliminary drafts. Then your final comment can refer to the student's progress through stages of a process: e.g., "I find this draft much easier to read than your previous one because you have now clarified some points for your readers by providing sufficient background on your topic."
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When you require the submission of the full writing folder, you are also protecting the students from the temptation to plagiarize. If you suspect that students have used undocumented or unacknowledged help in moving from one draft to the next, you can simply ask them to describe their procedures. Your examination of the full writing folder also makes it almost impossible for students to purchase papers from a commercial service. Unfortunately, the information revolution on the Internet is making it increasingly easier to purchase papers. Already one or two Vanderbilt students fail a "W" class each semester owing to plagiarism.
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Much more important than creating a hedge against plagiarism, the writing folders, simply by their growing girth, teach the students that they are writers. Very few writers ever see their work in print, but students persist in believing that writers are people who publish. When students look at their own substantial writing folders, they may begin to believe that writers are people who write.
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