Collaborative Writing Scripts

This activity is particularly well suited to classes in which collaborative writing is central to the course (e.g., mentioned in course learning objectives).  

By the end of this activity, students will be able to: 

• understand and explain what a collaborative writing script is 
• distinguish between common collaborative writing scripts and critically evaluate their suitability for different writing situations 
• combing collaborative writing scripts to develop, for an upcoming collaborative writing assignment, a script that is bespoke (tailor-made) for the assignment and the team  
• OPTIONAL: following the completion of the collaborative writing assignment, reflect on what collaboration strategies and scripts worked or did not work and make adjustments for upcoming assignments, as needed 

This activity is designed for courses that include a collaborative writing assignment and that can devote some class time (e.g., 1 class) to allow writing teams time to plan for an upcoming assignment. 

The worksheet is currently set up for an Annotated Bibliography writing assignment, but can be adapted for any collaborative writing assignment specific to your course.  

The infographic currently includes common collaborative writing scripts from the research literature. One notable absence is the fork + pull script commonly used in computer science in the context of coding. Other discipline-specific collaborative writing scripts could be added or discussed in class, as needed.  

The activity can also be adapted to include a reflection activity that asks individual students to complete a “Collaboration Disclosure and Reflection Form” after they submit their first team writing assignment. This Form invites students to consider what collaboration strategies and scripts they used, which ones worked (or didn’t work), and then follow-up this individual reflection with a team debrief. This added reflection (and debrief) stage can help cultivate team resilience and improve team writing strategies, but it requires more of a time commitment from students and teams. A team debrief would likely need to be scheduled outside of class time, and this can place a burden on some students (e.g., caring for children or elders, working part time after class). 

This activity is designed for a class with many English as an Additional Language (EAL) learners. The activity has been designed, in particular, to support students who might need time before class to understand the slides and team contract (all resources are made available before the activity). The activity also includes multi-modal explanation of common collaborative writing scripts: an (optional) reading, textual/visual slides, and an infographic. The worksheet can be complete digitally or using pen and paper (depending on students preferred modalities) and can be completed using images/symbols from the infographic, rather than alphanumeric text. The optional Collaboration Disclosure and Reflection Form would also be made available before the activity); it is mostly text, but invites students to draw their team’s approach to collaboration if this is more comfortable than describing the process in words. 

Actions & Assessment 

This is a completion activity. If students complete the activity with their teams in a way that reflects the scripts discussed in the slide deck and represented on the infographic, students receive credit for the work. 

Activity

TIME: Devote at least one class (50-80 minutes) to the activity. 

PREPARATION: Ahead of class, share all activity resources with students (e.g., on Canvas): slide deck, infographic, worksheet, and reading (optional). Invite students to review the materials before class, especially if they need time to read through them at their own pace. However, students complete the worksheet, working in their writing teams, in class. 

INSTRUCTIONS:

1. SLIDE DECK (15-20 minutes): Open class with the slide deck, which explains collaborative writing and common collaborative writing scripts.  

2. WORKSHEET INTRODUCTION (5 minutes): Explain the worksheet, which includes a table that students will fill in with their teammates. The table shows an upcoming writing assignment in the class divided into smaller writing tasks. Students are asked to decide what collaborative writing script to each for each smaller writing task — consider what each script is good for (and not good for), as well as the specifics of their team (strengths, dynamic, preferences). 

3. WORKSHEET COMPLETION (20 minutes): The slide deck prompts students to apply what they learned about collaboration scripts to complete the worksheet. Give writing teams at least 20 minutes to do this work. An important part of this activity is to make time for teams to discuss and decide what would work best for the assignment and what would work best for the team: recognize and acknowledge the time and effort required for students to explore, compare, and advocate for different scripting options; encourage students to use class time to actively negotiate a plan for the upcoming assignment.  

4. CLASS DISCUSSION: Randomly choose one writing team to share their mix-and-match collaborative writing script (e.g., using a randomizer like https://wheelofnames.com/). Invite other writing teams to ask questions and compare their approaches the same assignment. I also like to prepare an “Instructor Solution” and share it with students (and I often include my name in the randomizer, so I am just as likely to be chosen to share back as student teams). Have a class-wide discussion of strategies to effectively match writing tasks to suitable scripts and match teams with suitable scripts (e.g., scripts that suit team members schedules, expertise, access to technology). 

5. OPTIONAL FOLLOW-UP: An additional strategy to cultivate student agency is to complete an individual reflection and team debrief after the writing assignment. As an optional follow-up to the class activity, you can ask students to complete a “Collaboration Disclosure and Reflection Form” after they submit their assignment (which asks them to reflect individually on the team’s approach to collaborative writing) and follow up with team debrief (to reflect on the team’s approach collaboration collectively and discuss adjustments for future assignments). The Form prompts students to reflect individually on their own experiences completing the team writing assignment and can help students identify ‘pain points’ or ‘stressors’ they didn’t anticipate and advocate for changes to the team’s approach. A follow-up team debrief also can help a team advocate better for its needs — as a team, different from other teams in the class — and even reach out to the professor for guidance and support if needed. 

Students sometimes resist the idea of scripting their writing — and some students prefer to proceed without a script (indeed, this is an option to teams). One of the highlights of this activity is that just naming and explaining common collaborative writing scripts can be illuminating to students who have limited experience writing with others: whether they choose to script their collaborative writing or not, the activity gives them a vocabulary for thinking and talking about how they work with others (and a way to advocate for themselves and advocate for different approaches). Another highlight of the activity is the insight that simultaneous collaborative writing (called the SWIRL script in the infographic) can be very effective for writers who share expertise, but can be alienating, marginalizing, and overwhelming or threatening to students working in a different language or discussing issues they have less expertise in — this insight helps teams that include students with very diverse backgrounds reconsider what might be an approach to collaborative writing that will not support everyone on the team equally.