Collaborative Writing Playbook: An Instructor's Guide to Designing Writing Projects for Student Teams

Joe Moses and Jason Tham

Collaborative Writing Playbook: An Instructor's Guide to Designing Writing Projects for Student Teams supports writing across the curriculum by helping instructors overcome a key obstacle to assigning writing: the workload.

The Playbook is for instructors who would assign more writing in their courses if they could create meaningful assignments that complement course goals. The Playbook is for instructors who would assign collaborative writing if they could account for individual contributions to collaboratively written content and use assessment criteria consistent with course learning objectives.

Instructors can overcome the workload obstacles by identifying five learning objectives that writing and course content have in common: discipline-specific objectives for critical thinking, research, synthesis, genre/structure, and editing/peer review. By aligning writing objectives with course learning objectives, instructors can design writing projects, tasks, and   peer review roles that support rather than distract from course content.

Including collaborative writing throughout a course makes meaningful collaboration much easier to achieve than making collaboration a temporary activity, which can disrupt everyone's productivity. Joe Moses and Jason Tham present ideas for small and large activities that help instructors introduce collaboration at a pace that makes sense for them and sustains meaningful learning throughout a course.

COLLABORATIVE WRITING PLAYBOOK has several unique features:

• Practical tools for planning and promoting productive teamwork. 
• Roles for collaborative writing teammates that complement course-specific learning objectives.
• Structured activities designed specifically to support teammate interdependence and accountability.
• Templates for team charters, team planning, goal setting, and task coordination.
• A versatile, five-part structure-defined by instructors according to their preferences-for designing and evaluating team projects. 

What People Are Saying

"Collaboration is a professional imperative. This Collaborative Writing Playbook provides an authentic, reliable roadmap for team writing built on design thinking. You'll be pleased to deploy it for team writing and all forms of collaboration." - Ann Hill Duin, University of Minnesota

"Collaborative Writing Playbook revitalizes team-based writing instruction with a strong emphasis on modern career readiness. 'No team is automatically productive,' write authors Joe Moses and Jason Tham, who roll up their sleeves to rally instructors navigating the difficult world of designing collaborative assignments with a bold but agile five-part structure. The book deftly serves as both a complete model and one that is easily customizable to a range of classroom scenarios. Highly practical and resourceful, Playbook specifies a set of adaptable templates for activities, checklists and guides to prompt instructors. Playbook is a must-have!" - Isabel Pedersen, Ontario Tech University

"Collaborative Writing Playbook is a substantial, thoughtful, and insightful contribution to the discourse on collaborative writing. It is simultaneously a playbook, an instructor's guide, a textbook, a work of theory, even a guide for lesson planning and project design." - Jacob Richter, Clemson University

Joe Moses teaches collaborative writing, research, and project design in the Department of Writing Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Jason Tham (PhD, University of Minnesota) is Assistant Professor of Technical Communication and Rhetoric at Texas Tech University.

Joe Moses teaches collaborative writing, research, and project design in the Department of Writing Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. His co-written and co-edited scholarship appears in the Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Computers & Composition, Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization, The International Journal of Sociotechnology and Knowledge Development, and Connexions: International Professional Communication Journal.

Jason Tham is Assistant Professor of Technical Communication and Rhetoric at Texas Tech University. He codirects the User Experience (UX) Lab and teaches courses in UX research, information design, and digital rhetorics. He is a Research Partner of the Digital Life Institute at Ontario Tech University. His current research interests are design thinking approaches in technical communication pedagogy and practice. Tham’s work has appeared in Technical Communication, Journal of Technical Writing & Communication, Computers and Composition, and IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, among other journals and edited volumes. He is also author of Design Thinking in Technical Communication (2021, Routledge).