Collaboration and Community in the Writing Workshop: Build Your Expertise Blog Series

Writing and social interactions are inextricably linked: writing puts spoken word into print. The very purpose of writing is to communicate thoughts, ideas, and knowledge.

Therefore, we often make a leap of logic in belief and practice to build writing workshops that are social places intended to grow a community of writers. Social interactions are embedded throughout the workshop with practices like conferring, peer revision, and opportunities to share and celebrate throughout the writing process.

But what does research support regarding the social aspects of writing?

WHAT RESEARCH SAYS: The IES Practice Guide: Teaching Elementary School Students to Be Effective Writers (2012), published by What Works Clearinghouse through the U.S. Department of Education, names “creat[ing] an engaged community of writers” as one of four recommended practices.

In addition to the recommendations from the IES guidance, other findings from peer-reviewed research support the following practices:

• Peer-assisted writing, or collaborative writing between pairs of students of differing abilities, increases self-efficacy and improves writing performance in response to teacher instruction (De Smedt, Graham, & Van Keer, 2019).
• Reciprocal peer review (as cited in Philippakos and MacArthur, 2016), which includes peer revision and focused feedback, results in students making more impactful revisions and producing higher-quality writing (Boscolo & Ascorti, 2004; Brakel, 1990; MacArthur, Schwartz, & Graham, 1991; Stoddard & MacArthur, 1993). In addition, peer review may positively shift students’ self-perceptions about their writing abilities and improve their attitudes toward writing (Katstra, Tollefson, & Gilbert, 1987). 
• Steve Graham’s Writer(s) Within Community Model draws on “social, cultural, political, institutional, and historical influences” on writing to emphasize that writers need community and collaborators (Graham, 2018). This model also draws on the strong reciprocal relationship between the reader and the writer.

IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE: Research implies that building a community of writers is recommended and integral in developing young writers. When we take this work into our classrooms, there are many ways in which we can engage kids in working with one another and in growing as a community of writers, including:

• Build students’ skills in working in partnerships and engaging in peer conferences. According to Anderson and Glover (2024), some goals for this work may involve understanding how to talk about writing, giving (and receiving) feedback, and applying feedback to writing. These skills should be explicitly taught to set students up for partnership success.
• Center community and collaboration in your vision for teaching writing. Graham (2018) focuses on developing this vision as he writes about one teacher’s mission to align classroom practices with her beliefs. As part of this work, the teacher explicitly named her vision around audience, social practices, shared responsibilities, and making connections between home and school, all centered around her goal of establishing a strong community of writers.
• Reserve time for students to engage in collaboration and partnerships. While it’s easy to recognize that community is essential, balancing time in the workshop is never easy. Teachers must be intentional about deciding when and how writers can collaborate. By writing this practice into lesson plans and/or explicitly stating to students when this work will happen, we can secure the time needed to build the writing workshop’s social side.
• Establish collaboration as a habit, not a practice in isolation. Writers need one another to grow. While putting words onto a page is often a solitary act, it is only through many rounds of authentic feedback and support that writing makes its way out into the world.
• Model transparency about your writing. Teacher modeling, demonstration, and openness about being a writer is key to establishing a community. By positioning ourselves as “experts” who also engage in the process and struggle of writing, we show students what it means to be a writer.
• Ensure the community includes all writers. Students who need support in writing are often pulled out during workshop or paired up with the teacher for feedback and support instead of having the opportunity to work with peers. Interestingly, much of the research around the success of social writing models has been grounded in intervention settings with outcomes that strongly suggest that our most vulnerable writers will be positively impacted when we pair them up with a peer. All of our students must have the chance to sit down next to a peer for feedback, guidance, and support.

GO DEEPER:

• This “From the Archives” post by Jenna is an excellent roundup of ideas on how to build your writing community.
• Two Writing Teachers took a deep dive into the topic of partnerships and community in the blog series “Seen, Valued, Heard: Writing to Establish Community” in the fall of 2020. 
• The IES Practice Guide: Teaching Elementary School Students to Be Effective Writers (2012), cited below, is an excellent resource for unpacking strategies to create and sustain a community of writers.
• From the #TWTPod:
  • Joyful Writing Partnerships: A Tip For Tomorrow with Stacey https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/joyful-writing-partnerships-a-tip-for-tomorrow-from-stacey/id1637137189?i=1000625816156
  • Teaching Students About Partnerships and the Writing Process: A Tip for Tomorrow with Melanie https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/teaching-students-about-partnerships-and-the/id1637137189?i=1000582778919 

WORKS CITED:

De Smedt, F., Graham, S., & Van Keer, H. (2020). “It takes two”: The added value of structured peer-assisted writing in explicit writing instruction. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 60, 101835. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cedpsych.2019.101835 

Graham, S. (2022). Creating a classroom vision for teaching writing. The Reading Teacher, 75(4), 475-484. doi:10.1002/trtr.2064

Graham, S. (2023). Writer(s)-within-community model of writing as a lens for studying the teaching of writing. In R. Horrowitz (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of international research on writing, vol. II. New York: Routledge.

Graham, S., Bollinger, A., Booth Olson, C., D’Aoust, C., MacArthur, C., McCutchen, D., & Olinghouse, N. (2012). Teaching elementary school students to be effective writers: A practice guide (NCEE 2012- 4058). Washington, DC: National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education. Retrieved from http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/publications_reviews.aspx#pubsearch.

Philippakos, Z. A., & MacArthur, C. A. (2016). The effects of giving feedback on the persuasive writing of fourth- and fifth-grade students. Reading Research Quarterly, 51(4), 419–433. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.149 

GIVEAWAY INFORMATION: This is a giveaway of How to Become a Better Writing Teacher by Carl Anderson and Matt Glover, donated by Heinemann. To enter the giveaway, readers must leave a comment on any BUILD YOUR EXPERTISE BLOG SERIES POST by Sun., 2/18 at 12:00 PM EST. The winner will be chosen randomly and announced on February 19. The winner must provide their mailing address within five days, or a new winner will be chosen. TWT readers from around the globe are welcome to enter this contest!