In today’s era of the increasingly more prominent AI-generated student essay, teaching students how to write is more challenging than ever! And while AI will most certainly be an integral part of Gen-Z and Generation Alpha’s educational and professional careers, middle school and high school teachers across the globe are finding new ways to teach writing to ensure that students have the necessary skills for effective communication and critical thinking.
One way that I’ve adjusted my instruction because of AI is by focusing on more in-class writing either with paper and pencil or a lockdown browser. You can read more about how I address AI in this blog post. However, simply assigning writing is not enough to make sure our students are learning how to improve their writing skills –they also need explicit writing instruction and a variety of practice activities to help them practice their writing. That is where the in-class collaborative essay comes in! This post contains affiliate links.
Recently, I assigned my students an in-class collaborative essay on paper. While I’ve facilitated collaborative paragraphs and essays before, I needed to adapt my instructional strategies this time to do my best to AI-proof the activity. In retrospect, this was a highly effective activity, and I feel my students did well and improved in their writing abilities. If you find this strategy helpful, be sure to check out my secondary ELA teacher professional development book: Building Strong Writers: Strategies and Scaffolds for Teaching Writing in Secondary ELA.
Teaching Writing: Why Assign a Collaborative Essay
Assigning a collaborative essay in the middle school ELA and high school English classroom is a highly effective assignment that provides students with real-time opportunities for brainstorming, organizing, and drafting an essay. In their peer groups, students work together to organize their thoughts and ideas and form the sentences that will eventually comprise their essays.
By working in a group to do this, students actively participate in the writing process while also making small, self-edits to improve their writing as they go. Collaborative writing is also beneficial for students because it provides them with the opportunity to observe the thought process and writing process of their peers.
Teaching Writing: How to Set up a Collaborative Essay
In the past, I’ve had students work collaboratively in a shared Google Doc for their writing before. And while that was a great way to facilitate collaborative essays in the past, with today’s temptation of a done-for-you essay generated by AI is just too much for students. I cannot even tell you how many times I walk around my classroom and see ChatGPT open on my students’ Chromebooks. I wanted to completely eliminate the temptation, so I went with an all paper approach.
For this essay prompt, I had my students write a four paragraph essay: introduction, body paragraph 1, body paragraph 2, and conclusion. For each paragraph, I had them write on a separate piece of paper to maximize in-class productivity and engagement. If a group was sharing just one or two pieces of paper, more students would be observers rather than active participants.
I had students choose their own groups for this assignment, and I had them form groups of four. I instructed them to all work together on the introduction and thesis statement. They were to start there before moving on. This step was absolutely vital for the brainstorming and outlining portion of the essay: the student groups could not begin the body paragraphs until they had a solid thesis statement to guide them.
From there, I instructed the group of four to break up into partners. Each pair of partners within the group was tasked with writing one body paragraph together, and they had to organize their body paragraphs to align with the same order as the thesis statement.
As students wrapped up their body paragraphs, they wrote a quick conclusion restating the thesis statement and commenting on the passage’s impact on the audience. I only gave students one class period to do this. However, we prepped for a bit the day before to help speed up the process.
Since I didn’t have perfect groups of four students, some groups chose to work on groups of three. For those groups, one student worked on a body paragraph independently, and I instructed the groups to have the independent writer to choose the body paragraph they wanted to write. Generally, I noticed my stronger writers took on this role.
To help students understand the process, I also illustrated what the collaborative essay would look like on the whiteboard.
Teaching Writing: Strategies to Use for a Collaborative Essay
In addition to having the students work on the essay collaboratively, I also provided each group of students with a paper that had the prompt (since they didn’t have Chromebooks open and their phones were stored away at the front of the classroom in this cell phone holder). On the paper with the prompt, I also provided students with several sentence frames to use that loosely matched prompt.
The provided sentence frames were written in both the third person and in the literary present. In the days leading up to this activity, I also provided my students with direct instruction where I showed them color-coded versions of these sentence frames to emphasize the third person and literary present.
This is where backward planning comes into play. I knew where I was going with the final writing assignment, and I designed my instruction around that. In regard to how I graded this essay, it was all class participation where students received points for completing the process. I ultimately graded an individual essay after this process.
Back to setting up my strategies, at the beginning of class as I reviewed the sentence frames with students, we also discussed additional strong verbs students could use in their essays. They then wrote their essays as I circled throughout the room offering individualized feedback and instruction. My students stapled their papers and turned in their essays at the end of our 55-ish minute class.
Teaching Writing: Using Peer Review with a Collaborative Essay
After this process, I didn’t just want to stop here. On one of the following days, I had students complete a peer review activity where they returned to their original groups. For students who were absent on the writing day, I had them join existing groups. I distributed the essays to a new group, and I also gave them a copy of the rubric.
I instructed students to not only grade the essay on the rubric, but to also provide bullet-point explanations as to why they assigned the score that they did. I also instructed the students to mark up the essays with different ways to improve the writing. I wasn’t so much concerned with spelling and grammar, but I wanted them to focus on how to improve the content of the essay.
After the student groups worked with the essays for about 20 minutes, student groups then returned the essays to their original owners. At that time, my student groups then reviewed the feedback from their peers. And let me tell you, they are much harsher critics on themselves and each other than I am on them! It always seems to be that way, but that is okay because when students look at other papers with a critical eye, they in turn become more aware of their own writing!
Teaching Writing: Incorporating the Collaborative Essay in a Writing Unit
While collaborative essay writing might seem like a great idea because there is less to grade, the benefits extend far beyond that! After collecting the peer-reviewed essays, I then graded the essays on the rubric and also provided on-paper comments. Usually, I have 35 students per class, so this is too much to do for every essay, but since there were fewer papers, I was able to provide this level of detailed feedback to my students.
My students then applied these layers of feedback to their own writing for the final writing assessment of the unit. Again, this is where backward planning is so keen. I planned this whole collaborative essay with the final essay in mind. Both prompts were similar, and each prompt required students to demonstrate similar skills. For their individual essay (which was also in-class and only during one class period), students could either write a four-paragraph essay or a three-paragraph essay. I emphasized that I would rather have them write an essay with one body paragraph that was stronger and went into more analysis rather then an essay with two body paragraphs that were more surface level.
The Collaborative Essay Writing Details
I facilitated this activity in an honors sophomore English class during our Night unit. This was the class’ first experience with rhetorical analysis, and in particular, working with the AP Language FRQ2 rubric. And while I completed this activity with an honors-level sophomore class, I’ve also done with with general English students as well! You can read more about my collaborative paragraph poster activity in this blog post.
Prompt: In chapters 3-4, Elie discusses the inhumanity of the concentration camps. Write an essay that analyzes the effectiveness of Wiesel’s use of rhetorical strategies to describe the inhumane conditions that contribute to the message of these chapters. You can focus on tone, diction, imagery, repetition, parallelism, anaphora, syntax, or another rhetorical strategy.
Students chose one rhetorical strategy for the first body paragraph and chose another for the second body paragraph.
Resources for Teaching Essay Writing
Essay Writing Teaching Unit – Teach your students how to write an essay! This comprehensive essay writing bundle includes teaching resources and lessons for every part of an essay. Plus, it includes digital resources!
Essay Writing Skills Unit – Help your students improve their writing by focusing on one specific aspect of writing at a time. These Writing Spotlight Mini-Units help students improve their writing by focusing on specific skills to enhance writing!
