5 Steps for Great Collaborative Writing

I love working on collaborative writing projects with my primary learners! :)  It gives them a chance to learn to work with others and to give one another meaningful feedback on group project.  I have a six step writing process in my classroom.  Once the students have individually drafted their part of the writing, they get to add it to the team assignment. I will admit the first few times we did something like this, it took some time, but after Christmas...this stuff is a breeze and they get really into it.  Each time we wrote in teams--or collaboratively--I did a few things with my kids to help them learn my expectations. Although the topics would change, the grading and the peer relationship expectations did not. Let's jump into the five steps that I used with my littles.

The first thing I did was select partners based on leadership and ability.  I like choosing the partners the first time because I am training the students on specific things to look for when partnering. Initially I like to work in pairs or triads.  Each group should have a strong leader, a strong writer, and someone with good handwriting.  This formula usually works well for collaborative writing projects.

Students love titles!  Whenever I am doing a collaborative project, everyone has a name! :)

The project manager makes sure that the assigned task gets done.  They are responsible to keep the group organized and on task.  They solve any problems that come up--or come to me with the things that the team can not solve.  I like to use picture rubrics at the beginning, and then change over to rubrics and directions with words.  I give the project managers explicit directions about the role that each person plays, so that they can help each person on their team to complete their role.

Having the right directions will be key in making the students successful.  I like a step by step approach.  In this example, each person in the group had a card with directions on what they should contribute to the overall writing.  Each student has to contribute at least one sentence to the finished product.  When the writing is complete, they present it as a team to the class.

Each team has support for spelling words that relate to the topic.  The biggest thing that keeps my students from writing is trying to spell things.  It's what keeps them from completing things.  I like to offer cards that have common language for the topics.  In this example, students are writing about community helper jobs!

All of the students know that I grade with rubrics.  I work hard at making sure they understand my expectations before they start writing, then the project managers go over it again.  In this example, the students have a pictorial representation of the expectations.  I give percentage grades based on the numeric system of the rubric.  

Collaborative writing in primary is a lot of fun once you establish some easy guidelines.

This is great opportunity to get your students to understand what working together really looks like.  Students learn how to be good partners.  The language skills that they learn in these types of projects are invaluable.