History is littered with solitary writers, whether struggling or successful. But, solitary does not equal either achievement or failure. There is no reason for writing to be a solitary pursuit. Collaborative pursuits like writers workshops and writing retreats have produced incredible pieces of literature for decades. Even centuries ago, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (later Shelley) spent a rainy summer in a castle with John William Polidori, Percy Shelley, and Lord Byron, writing the start of an incredible piece of literature, Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus. Writing in collaboration or even giving peer feedback in a group, can elevate a simple ghost story to a the canon of classical literature.

     With any writing assignment, there is a simple, quick way to change it from a solitary, struggling pursuit to an engaging, collaborative process:

• Take the writing assignment, group your students in the way you see best (by strengths/areas of opportunity, by ways in which they interact, by leadership styles, etc).
• Then, within each group, assign students a group task and then roles.  With analytical/persuasive writing, I prefer to group task the thesis statement, having it formed through group discussion & revision.
• After there is a clear thesis, I then assign roles of: Topic Sentence Innovator, Evidence Investigator, and Supporting Sentence Specialist. 
• If you're worried about who wrote what when, have your students write in a Google Doc, each in a different color, and allow them to use the chat & commenting features to keep the volume level at a respectable level in the room while they write OR allowing this to be an out of class activity.

Then comes the part I love and the part where students REALLY begin to learn from each other: Editing and Revising. You can take the original drafts and distribute them to different groups, tasking them to edit and revise the writing of others. This simple process allows your students to now be exposed to the writing of others as well as their own writing.

Having students edit and revise the work of others creates a KEY piece in developing a student's self-reflection abilities: Teens tend to be more critical of others.  Allowing them to first lend their critical eye to the writing of others, allows them to be more willing to later look at their own work through a critical lens.

 As an English teacher, I'm always a big fan of multiple drafts and the last stage of this drafting process for me is checking sources, citations, and grammar. Draft Coach is an extension in Google Docs that allows for Similarity, Citations, and Grammar checks to be run, issues to be identified, and guidance giving for addressing these issues. Assigning each student in the group a role of Similarity Source Scrutinizer, Citation Scanner, and Grammar Guru and tasking them with addressing the identified issues in Draft Coach allows the students to read, yet again, another group's writing, and delve deeper into the writing process. 

This collaborative process is about the process, not the outcome. In an assignment workflow such as this, the PRODUCT is really not the point; the product is simply something that happens and the PROCESS is where students are learning.  So, every once in awhile, step away from the solitary struggles with writing and use a collaborative process to help your writers gain skills and insights from their peers. If you can involve multiple grade levels in this assignments, the outcomes of this process could be truly incredible! 

Works Cited

Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. Frankenstein, or, the Modern Prometheus. Everyman’s Library, 1992.