Portfolio Product Description

Collaborative Learning Theory and Practice
An Annotated Bibliography

Harriet Napierkowski

Astin, A. (1993). What matters in college: Four critical years revisited. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Completed a longitudinal study of 27,064 students at 309 baccalaureate-granting institutions; interested in student outcomes as dependent variables and how they are affected by different independent variables. Found that interaction among students and between faculty and students affected more educational outcomes than any other variables studied.

Berliner, D. C. (1992, October). "Redesigning classroom activities for the future." Educational Technology: 7-13.

Berliner sees the middle school (fifth through ninth grade) as the center of educational change in the next decade. Change within middle schools is motivated by advances in technology, as well as by the theory of constructivism. Multidimensional learning environments, authentic portfolios and projects, and modified curriculum are all dimensions of this discussion on change.

Bishop, W. & Fulwiler, T. (1997). The braiding of classroom voices: Learning to write by learning to learn. In W. E. Campbell and K. A. Smith (Eds.), New paradigms for college teaching (pp. 38-50).

Edina, MN: Interaction. Students need to enter the community of literate learners and to be confident speakers and writers of the new knowledge they encounter. Also, students talking to other students makes a difference. The best way for students to learn history or chemistry is through writing. This requires that students move from a position of being outside a community to moving inside of it.

Brooke, R., Mirtz, R., & Evans, R. (1994). Small groups in writing workshops. Urbana, IL: NCTE.

Writing groups facilitate four elements that are essential to a writer's life: time for writing, ownership of the uses of writing, a community of responders, and exposure to other people's writing. Groups are complex communities, with social and emotional challenges for students. Such challenges are opportunities for learning to deal with differences of many kinds.

Bruffee, K. A. (1978). The Brooklyn plan: Attaining intellectual growth through peer-group tutoring. Liberal Education, 64, 447-469.

Students are sometimes more effective than teachers in helping other students gain confidence and ability in writing because the students are engaged socially and intellectually at once.

Bruffee, K. A. (1984). Collaborative learning and the "conversation of mankind." College English, 46(7), 635-652.

Presents a social view of knowledge; maintains that knowledge is something we generate and maintain in company with and in dependency upon each other.

Bruffee, K. A. (1990). "Response to the JAC interview with Richard Rorty." Journal of Advanced Composition 10, 145-146.

This article defines Bruffee's approach to and understanding of social construction theory.

Bruffee, K. A. (1993). Collaborative learning: Higher education, interdependence, and the authority of knowledge. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Knowledge has traditionally been understood as cognitive--we gain it by examining the world and taking in the facts. Bruffee offers a different model, one that accounts for new ways of thinking about how we learn. He proposes that knowledge is "constructed through negotiation with others" in communities of knowledgeable peers, arguing that this new understanding of learning as an interdependent, collaborative enterprise is a central issue in a university education.  Bruffee's premise is that learning occurs among persons, not between persons and things. He thus overturns traditional notions about the authority of knowledge, the authority of teachers, and the very nature and authority of universities.

Campbell, W. & Smith, K. Eds. (1997). New paradigms for college teaching. Edina, MN: Interaction.

This collection of essays focuses on higher education, learning communities, and constructivism.

Deming, E. (1986). Out of crisis. Boston, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Deming advances the idea of participatory behavior as an important element of productivity in business.

Duffy, T., J., Lowyck, J., & Jonassen, D. (1993). Designing environments for constructivist learning. Berlin: Springer-Verlag.

This book grew out of an international conference on constructivist learning environments. The dozens of contributing authors explore the implications of constructivism for both theory and practice. Several chapters describe constructivist learning environments for adult learners. Other chapters discuss technological support for constructivist learning environments, analyze design issues, and provide case studies of constructivism in practice.

Ede, L. & Lunsford, A. (1990). Singular texts/plural authors: Perspectives on collaborative writing. Carbondale, IL, Southern Illinois University Press.

The authors challenge the assumption that writing is a solitary act. That challenge is grounded in their own personal experience as long-term collaborators and in their extensive research, including a three-stage study of collaborative writing funded by Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education. The project included an initial survey of 1400 randomly selected members in seven different professional organizations, a second survey of 12 members of each organization, and on-site interviews held across the country with survey respondents. The actual surveys presenting the mean answers of the respondents and some of the interviews are reproduced in the book, along with a discussion of the results that outlines the problems and the benefits of group writing and demonstrates the frequent occurrence of collaborative writing in the work force. By tracing the history of writing, the authors show how the myth of the solitary writer as the foundation of all knowledge has informed the Western philosophical tradition and how contemporary challenges to this tradition are growing. The book also explores questions of power and reward for collaborative writing, as well as the pedagogy of collaboration. It includes a survey of collaborative writing theory in composition, an example of a college collaborative writing assignment, and eight guidelines for adapting collaboration to classrooms.

Elbow, P. (1973). Writing without teachers. New York: Oxford University Press.

Many writers have been trained to think that good writing proceeds from an organized outline through a near-perfect rough draft to an error-free final draft. This view is wrong for many writers, for it assumes that writers know exactly what they want to say before they begin writing. A better way to begin is "freewriting," deliberately unfocused but sustained written brainstorming from which a "center of gravity" for an organized essay can emerge. Working on drafts is then a process of "growing," or allowing the organization to remain flexible at first while you generate as many ideas as possible on your subject, and "cooking," or submitting your draft to constructive critical interaction with the demands of fellow writers, carrying on an interplay of the "doubting game" (radical skepticism about another's work) and the "believing game" (fully entering another's worldview).

Flower, L., Wallace, D. L., Norris, L., & Burnett, R. E. (1994). Making thinking visible: Writing, collaborative planning, and classroom inquiry. Urbana, IL: NCTE.

Piaget (1932) and Vygotsky (1987) each argued that children do not simply imitate or absorb knowledge; they are in the process of constructing it. The constructivist tradition that draws on their work theorizes that learning is a process of appropriating information to construct knowledge and an understanding of the world. Both readers and writers engage in constructing coherent meaning. Flower discusses the concept of collaborative planning--says it's more than just reading and writing; helps writers articulate alternatives and experiment with different ways of constructing meaning.

Forman, J. (Ed.). (1992). New visions of collaborative writing. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook.

This book consists of 9 chapters by 9 different authors. The preface does a good job of defining collaboration; defining social construction of knowledge; pointing to the lack of consensus among researchers on a definition of collaboration in writing; giving a brief history of the roots of collaborative theory in writing; placing collaborative/social theory in broader context of other theories of composition; and explaining how collaborative theory draws from other fields--thus, the need for an interdisciplinary approach.

Freire, P. (1998). Pedagogy of freedom: Ethics, democracy, and civic courage. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.

Teaching is not just transferring knowledge--teaching is a human act. Discusses how engaged learning is central to the creation of the individual, culture and history. Freire argues that learning and activism are the essence of human life.

Gere, A. R., & Roop, L. J. (1992). For profit and pleasure: Collaboration in nineteenth century women's literary clubs. In J. Forman (Ed.), New visions of collaborative writing (pp. 1-18. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook.

By examining the reading and writing practices of nineteenth-century women's clubs, this essay explores forms of collaboration that appear in these clubs. It describes the intertextual, intergenerational collaboration that blurred boundaries between reading and writing and strengthened gender identity. Contemporary writing classes, it argues, manifest continuity with these clubs in the empowerment of textual ownership in writing groups.

Graham, P., & Hudson-Ross, S. (1998). Teacher/mentor: A dialogue for collaborative learning. Urbana, IL:

In this book, teachers describe classroom research that connects theory and practice, the basics of student teaching (from communication to discipline to leading discussions), and the struggles to collaborate across schools and university settings. A group of mentor teachers, university faculty, and teacher candidates worked collectively to create the book, which offers advice based on classroom research as well as insights into how readers can invent their own collaborative inquiry communities to realize reform in teaching and teacher education.

Harrison, K. L. (1997). The terminology of composition studies: A historical approach. Unpublished dissertation, Louisiana State University.

Recently, composition scholars have shown an interest in examining their own language. This study provides an historical analysis of the terminology commonly used in composition studies. The historical focus allows an analysis of how our vocabulary has changed in relation to specific schools of thought in composition studies, thus encouraging an awareness of the influence of context--professional, institutional, cultural, and personal--on the scholarship in composition studies.

Holt, M. (1988). Collaborative learning from 1911-1986: A sociohistorical analysis. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Texas, Austin.

The purpose of this study is to provide an historical and cultural analysis of collaborative theory and practice from the perspective of American pragmatism. This analysis is based in the examination of articles in academic journals and other sources from 1911 to 1986. The author examines the significant differences among various models of collaborative practice through consideration of central philosophical assumptions regarding knowledge, authority, and social relations within the framework of contemporary educational and cultural contexts. She argues that American pragmatism, specifically the work of George Herbert Mead, John Dewey, and Richard Rorty, provides a consistent intellectual justification for collaborative classroom practice. The study establishes an historical and theoretical approach to collaborative pedagogy.

Howard, S. A. (1999). Guiding collaborative teamwork in the classroom, [electronic article]. Available: http://cte.uncwil.edu/et/articles/howard/

Technological advances, global competition, and workplace turbulence have led to changes in the American economic arena. Today, leaders in business and industry cite the ability to work collaboratively as a requisite for succeeding in the global economic environment. However, research indicates that many students arrive on the college campus with little or no experience in working as part of a team. This articles discusses teaching strategies applicable to any post-secondary course that lends itself to team projects.

Hoy, D. C. (1988). Foucault: Modern or postmodern. In J. Arac (Ed.), After Foucault: Humanistic knowledge, postmodern challenges (pp. 12-41). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. 

Argues that knowledge is no longer a result of an individual. Rather, it is socially produced, and the individual must be educated into a community's ongoing discourse.

Johnson, D. W., & Johnson, R. T. (1989). Cooperation and competition: Theory and research. Edina, MN: Interaction.

Advances the theory of social interdependence; argues that it exists when each individuals' outcomes are affected by the actions of others. Provides graphs, charts, and summaries of meta-analyses/studies. More concerned with social interdependence than academic interdependence. Makes a distinction between interdependence, dependence, and independence.

Johnson, D. W., Johnson, R. T., & Smith, K. A. (1991a). Active learning: Cooperation in the college classroom. Edina, MN: Interaction.

Johnson, Johnson and Smith have been espousing active learning and class participation as an important ingredient in learning for the past 30 years. Ten chapters on cooperative learning. Provides some theory, but mostly a how-to book.

Johnson, D. W., Johnson, R. T., & Smith, K. A. (1991b). Cooperative learning: Increasing college faculty instructional productivity. ASHE-ERIC Higher Education Report Number 4. Washington, DC: George Washington University.

The use of active learning strategies, such as cooperative learning, is growing at a remarkable rate. Professors are incorporating cooperative learning to increase students' achievement, create positive relationships among students, and promote students' healthy psychological adjustment to school. This monograph is about how college faculty can ensure that students actively create their knowledge rather than passively listening to the professor's. It is about structuring learning situations cooperatively at the college level so that students work together to achieve shared goals

Johnson, D. W., Johnson, R. T., & Smith, K. (1996). Academic controversy: Enriching college instruction through intellectual conflict. Washington, DC: George Washington University Press.

The authors argue for the value of introducing organized conflict into the collaborative higher education classroom. They provide strong evidence of its value, citing numerous studies and providing a detailed explanation of a workable procedure for applying the concepts in the college classroom. The report also includes a number of sample cases to illustrate the flexibility of the procedure.

Kennedy, M., Fisher, M., & Ennis, R. (1991). Critical thinking: Literature review and needed research. In L. Idol & B. F. Jones (Eds.), Educational values and cognitive instruction: Implications for reform. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

This chapter provides an historical overview of the topic of critical thinking, from John Dewey through the mid-1980's report, A Nation at Risk. It discusses a variety of definitions of the term "critical thinking." The authors also cover topics relevant to the teaching of critical thinking (subject matter specificity, transfer, classroom atmosphere, assessment) and to the learning of critical thinking (developmental readiness, prior knowledge, and student characteristics). They include a detailed outline of behavioral goals for a critical thinking curriculum, as well as a list of specific instruments designed to assess critical thinking.

Knuth, R. A., & Cunningham, D. J. (1993). Tool for constructivism. In T. Duffy, J. Lowyck & D. Jonassen (Eds.), Designing environments for constructivist learning (pp. 163-187). Berlin: Springer-Verlag.

This article lists seven pedagogical goals for designers of constructivist learning environments: (1) Provide experience with the knowledge construction process. (2) Provide experience in and appreciation for multiple perspectives. (3) Embed learning in realistic and relevant contexts. (4) Encourage ownership and voice in the learning process. (5) Embed learning in social experience. (6) Encourage the use of multiple modes of representation. (7) Encourage self-awareness of the knowledge construction process.

Kroll, B. M. (1984). Writing for readers: Three perspectives on audience. College Composition and Communication, 35, 172-185.

Three conceptions of audience are influential in composition teaching: rhetorical, informational, and social. The rhetorical perspective draws from classical theory and recommends adapting speech or writing to the characteristics of the audience. This advice is generally good, but the perspective is flawed: it casts audiences as adversarial, it ignores the impossibility of characterizing most audiences, and it takes an unsophisticated view of reader psychology. The second approach is that writing must convey information to the reader effectively, by attending to the difficulties readers have extracting meaning from texts. But this model tends to give a mechanistic and reductive account of text-processing. The third approach is that writing is a social activity like all communication, requiring a decentering from the self that allows the speaker or writer to take another's perspective. Collaborative writing and reader feedback support this approach pedagogically. The "sense of audience" promoted here, though, is vague, and it can be objected that writing is not social but rhetorical, more connected to genre and convention than to social knowledge.

Lay, M. M. (1992). The androgynous collaborator: The impact of gender studies on collaboration. In J. Forman (Ed.), New visions of collaborative writing (pp. 82-104). Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook.

Collaborative writing is affected by the community in which it is produced, whether that community is the classroom or the business and industrial setting. Interpersonal dynamics within the group or team often determine the success of the collaborative product, and the gender of the collaborators contributes to those interpersonal dynamics. Psychological and social barriers exist that may inhibit male sex-typed collaborators from learning the group maintenance skills that enhance effective collaboration. This essay describes androgynous behavior that overcomes those barriers.

Lenning, O. T., & Ebbers, L. H. (1999). The powerful potential of learning communities: Improving education for the future (ASHE-ERIC Higher Education Report Volume 26, No. 6). Washington, DC: George Washington University.

Lenning and Ebbers differentiate among learning organizations, faculty learning communities, and student learning communities. They define physical interaction, virtual interaction, correspondent interaction. They list ten recommendations from the Boyer Commission 1998 on undergraduate education and seven suggestions for learning communities (cited from Tinto). A discussion of virtual learning communities cites one 1997 five-week summer course with graduate students and a study of the eleven virtual universities (none located in the United States), but the primary emphasis is on cost savings rather than on academic excellence. Includes lots of lists.

Leverenz, C. S. (1994). Peer response in the multicultural composition classroom: Dissensus--a dream (deferred). In G. A. Olson & S. I. Dobrin (Eds.), Composition theory for the postmodern classroom (pp. 254-273). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Describes a case study of a peer group in a multi-culturally focused classroom and the problems of "dissensus" and power that arose.

Light, R. J. (1992). The Harvard assessment seminars: Second report. Boston, MA, Harvard University Press.

Light argues that students who get the most out of college, who grow the most academically, and who are the happiest, organize their time to include interpersonal activities with faculty members or with fellow students, built around substantive, academic work.

Locker, K. O. (1992). What makes a collaborative writing team successful? A case study of lawyers and social workers in a state agency. In J. Forman (Ed.), New visions of collaborative writing (pp. 37-62). Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook.

This article examines the process by which a report initiating a class-action suit on behalf of a group of mentally retarded individuals was created. The report was a collaborative document, written by a second group after another group was unsuccessful. The article examines the two groups' processes and products and the factors that made the second collaborative team successful.

Mayer, J. (1990). Uncommonsense learning. In J. Mayer (Ed), Uncommon sense: Theoretical practice in language education (pp. 75-105). Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook.

Mayer argues that the emphasis in school should be on active, intentional, and self-directed learning. Learning is part of life, and we learn by "constructing our story of the way the world works" through experience, testing our ideas, and reflection. The book explores how to design schools of "uncommon sense" that support effective learning.

McClelland, B. & Donovan, T., Eds. (1985). Perspectives on research and scholarship in composition. New York: Modern Language Association.

This book consists of 13 essays by prominent rhetoricians (Burns, Trimbur, Strong) on composition research and scholarship. The first chapter presents a professional and historical context for the role of composition in the English department. The other chapters address major philosophical issues and directions in research in the field of composition, including the origins, theory, and current practices of collaborative learning.

McLeod, S. H. (1997). Notes from the heart: Affective issues in the writing classroom. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.

Provides a useful overview social construction, collaborative learning, writing theory, and cognition theory.

McKeachie, W. (1988). Teaching thinking. National Center for Research for the Improvement of Postsecondary Teaching and Learning Update 1(2) 79-88.

Concludes that three elements make a difference in students' gains in thinking skills: student discussion, emphasis on problem solving, and verbalization of strategies to encourage development of metacognition. "Student participation, teacher encouragement, and student-to-student interaction positively relate to improved critical thinking. These three activities confirm other research and theory stressing the importance of active practice, motivation, and feedback in thinking skills as well as other skills. This confirms that discussion, especially in small classes, are superior to lectures in improving thinking and problem solving" (p 81).

Millis, B. & Cottell, P. (1998). Cooperative learning for higher education faculty. Phoenix, AZ: Oryx Press.

his book on cooperative learning at the postsecondary level is designed to serve as a resource for faculty who use a collaborative approach to education. It offers an overview of the cooperative learning process, including its rationale, research base, value, and practical implementation. The authors also describe a variety of approaches to cooperative learning drawn from complementary movements such as classroom research, writing across the curriculum, computer technology, and critical thinking.

North, S. M. (1987). The making of knowledge in composition: Portrait of an emerging field. Upper Montclair, NJ: Boynton/Cook.

Attempts to synthesize and examine "modes of inquiry" in the study of composition with a big "C." Defines community as "located by finding people who interact regularly with one another in their work. They read and use each other's ideas, discuss each other's work, and sometimes collaborate. They have common friends, acquaintances, intellectual ancestors, and opponents, and thus locate themselves at roughly the same point in sociometric space. Their interaction is facilitated by shared beliefs and values--goals, myths, terminology, self-concepts--which make their work mutually intelligible and valuable. Although they do not all use exactly the same procedure in their work, there is a great deal of similarity, and the differences are accepted as variant realizations of the same values." pp. 17-18.

Oblinger, D. G., & Maruyama, M. K. (1996). Distributed learning. CAUSE Professional Paper Series, 14, 1-25.

New model for learning should put the student at the center, with flexible access to people and information. This involves changing three things: instructor changes from gate-keeper, becomes designer of the learning environment - change from teacher-centered to learner-centered; location is no longer just a classroom - becomes a virtual community of learners; time becomes a variable rather than fixed quantity - entry point and exit point depend upon background of learner. Redesign of education should involve rethinking of institutional strategies and asking: Why do we do what we do? Why do we do it the way we do? What must we do? (What is critical to success) What should we do (regardless of what is currently done?)

O'Donnell, A. M., et al. (1985). Cooperative writing: Direct effects and transfer. Written Communication, 2, 307-315.

O'Donnell compares students who work in dyads and students who work individually; concludes that students who work in dyads perform better in communicative quality of writing on both the initial task and the transfer task. The writing task was a set of instructions.

Olson, G. A. (1989). Social construction and composition theory: A conversation with Richard Rorty. Journal of Advanced Composition, 9(1-2), 1-9.

An interview with Richard Rorty. Rorty reveals that he does not wholeheartedly bless everything that Bruffee says about the value of collaboration. Says that he is suspicious of theoretical justifications for practice--he would want to look at how well the practice is working and then base a rationale for it as a result.

Palmer, P. (1997). The renewal of community in college education. In W. E. Campbell & K. A. Smith (Eds.), New paradigms for college teaching (pp. 1-18). Edina, MN: Interaction.

Palmer argues for the renewal of community in higher education. He also argues that building community does not reduce good teaching to a particular methodology, but helps us "to understand the dynamics that make connectedness a powerful force for learning in whatever form it takes" (p 12). Palmer also argues that the model of community in higher education reflects an insight into epistemology, into how human beings acquire knowledge and understanding. "Human beings know by holding together a very complicated paradox of the subjective and the objective, of the intimate and the removed" (p 15).

Perkins, D. N. (1991). What constructivism demands of the learner. Educational Technology, 31(9), 19-21.

The nature of a constructivist learning environment imposes increased demands on the learner when compared to traditional instruction. Among these demands are higher cognitive load, increased responsibilities for self-management of learning, and an imposed dual agenda requiring learners to learn both the subject matter and metacognitive processes associated with learning. Perkins suggests solutions that may reduce the demands of constructivism.

Perkins, D. N. (1992). Smart schools. New York: The Free Press.

A readable explanation of the philosophy of constructivism and how it could be implemented in American classrooms. Perkins bases his ideas on both contemporary research and classic thinking in the field of education. At best, we can expect traditional teaching to result in students' having a limited grasp of a subject. Perkins envisions schools where students are encouraged to think and grapple with the subject.

Petraglia, J. (1995). Spinning like a kite: A closer look at the pseudotransactional function of writing. Journal of Advanced Composition, 15, 19-33.

Transctional writing aims to get things done in the world, such as informing, persuading, or instructing. Most writing in composition classes, however, is pseudotransactional: while students are asked to consider audience, purpose, and appropriate persona, which seem to be rhetorical concerns, assignments often pose hypothetical cases while serving primarily as occasions for grading. Thus students do not develop a truly rhetorical, self-reflective grasp of discursive practices. Composition teachers have failed to deal with the problem of pseudotransactionality. They either deny it through expressivist pedagogies claiming that students will provide "their own" purposes" for writing, or escape it through assigning collaborative work, writing that tests knowledge of reading, or writing-across-the curriculum. Composition scholars must not let their postmodern skepticism about the possibility of determing assignments "authenticity" or "reality" prevent them from addressing this problem.

Piaget, J. (1932). The language and thought of the child (M. Gabin, Trans.). New York: Harcourt Brace.

Children not only imitate and absorb knowledge--they construct it. Decentering is a term that Piaget (1932) created for his research in child development; he argues that it occurs when the mind considers and coordinates experience from more than one perspective or point of view.

Pontecorvo, C., & Zucchermaglio, C. (1990). A passage to literacy: Learning in a social context. In Y. Goodman (Ed.), How children construct literacy: Piagetian perspectives . Newark, DE: International Reading Assoc.

Examines the nature of collaborative learning in the classroom.

Porter, J. E. (1992). Audience and rhetoric: An archeological composition of the discourse community. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

From the Western rhetorical tradition, we have inherited a conception of "audience" as a group of real people passively listening to an oral discourse, mere receivers of the communicator's message. Contemporary theory has disrupted this conception, however, with claims that "audience" is actually imagined by the author or called up by the text itself, or even that the notion of discrete individuals who could send or receive messages is problematic. With a survey of conceptions of audience from Aristotle to George Campbell to the New Rhetoric, reader-response criticism, and social constructivism, Porter shows that other disciplinary concerns, as well as cultural and political trends, tend to influence what concept of audience prevails. Porter advocates adherence to a social constructivist view in which the audience collaborates with the writer or speaker in various ways from the beginning of the composing process.

Reither, J. A., & Vipon, D. (1989`). Writing as collaboration. College English, 51(8), 855-867.

Reither and Vipon contend that writing is a profoundly collaborative process. "All of us who write must ground our language in the knowing of those who have preceded us. We make our meanings not alone, but in relation to others' meanings, which we come to know through reading, talk, and writing" p. 862.

Rogers, P. S. & Horton, M. S. (1992). Exploring the value of face-to-face collaborative writing. In J. Forman (Ed.), New visions of collaborative writing (pp. 120-146). Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook.

This essay presents a case for the value of face-to-face collaborative writing through research done at the Center for Machine Intelligence.

Roth, J. K. (Ed.). (1997). Inspiring teaching: Carnegie professors of the year speak. Bolton, MA: Anker.

The book is divided into four parts: teaching characteristics, teaching practices, teaching philosophies, and teaching teachers. Deals with effective learning, cyberspace, and collaborative teaching. Essay give insight into how, with a little change, a class period can go from "good" to "inspiring."

Schilb, J. (1992). The sociological imagination and the ethics of collaboration. In J. Forman (Ed.), New visions of collaborative writing (105-119). Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook.

Collaboration may occur in various ethical contexts, which writing students ought to examine. When students collaborate with one another, they should be encouraged to study how their activities connect to struggles for freedom in the larger world.

Sharan, S. (1980). Cooperative learning in small groups: Recent methods and effects on achievement, attitudes and ethnic relations. Review of Educational Research 50(2): 315-342.

Collaborative learning is based on the principle of a learner-centered model in which the student is an active participant in the learning process. Research has shown that students achieve greater cognitive development working together than they do working individually.

Shlomo, S., Ed. (1990). Cooperative learning: Theory and research. New York: Praeger.

This book consists of twelve chapters by various authors on different aspects of research on cooperative learning.

Silberman, M. (1996). Active learning: 101 strategies to teach any subject. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

Brings together in one source a comprehensive collection of instructional strategies designed to get the class away from traditional lecture methods and to engage the students actively in discussion, debate, creative thinking, questioning, teamwork, and collaborative learning.

Smit, D. W. (1989). Some difficulties with collaborative learning. Journal of Advanced Composition, 9, 45-58.

Basically argues that the research doesn't focus on whether collaborative learning improves writing performance. Additionally, he argues that the studies have been often done rather sloppily, so that other factors, not collaborative learning, may have been a factor in terms of improvement. In particular, he questions the study by John Clifford (1981) and by George Hillocks (1986).

Smith, K. A., & Waller, A. A. (1997). Cooperative learning for new college teachers. In W. E. Campbell and K. A. Smith (Eds.), New paradigms for college teaching (186-209). Edina, MN: Interaction.

This book focuses on cooperative learning in the college classroom and argues that there is a difference between cooperative learning and simply putting people in groups.

Thralls, C. (1992). Bakhtin, collaborative partners, and published discourse: A collaborative view of composing. In J. Forman (Ed.), New visions of collaborative writing (63-81). Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook.

Although most research on collaboration has explored the concept of joint authorship, current social theory suggests that all writing is essentially collaborative, even when that writing is attributed to a single author. At present, however, theoretical support for this claim remains scattered throughout the literature in rhetoric and composition, leaving writing specialists without a clearly synthesized theoretical framework for explaining the range and significance of relationships that can exist among collaborators when texts are ostensibly produced by individual rather than plural authors. This essay suggests that Bakhtin's theory of language can provide that theoretical framework, allowing writing specialists to account for the collaborative impulses in all writing.

Tinto, V. (1993). Leaving college: Rethinking the causes and cures of student attrition. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

Students need to feel connected to one another in order to be successful in college. Two major reasons for dropping our of college are a failure to establish a social network of friends and failure to become academically involved in classes.

Trimbur, J. (1985). Collaborative learning and teaching writing. In B. W. McClelland & T. R. Donovan (Eds.), Perspectives on research and scholarship in composition (pp. 87-109). New York: Modern Language Association.

Trimbur discusses collaborative learning as a relatively new term in composition studies. Through accumulated experience and a widening theoretical discussion, experiment in collaborative learning now constitute, Trimbur argues, a method for composition teachers and a problem for theorists: how to organize and interpret the activity of learning to write through the group interaction of the learners. Trimbur provides historical and conceptual background, theories of collaborative learning, discussion of writing as a learning activity, and directions in research and theory development. Includes a discussion of Fish's "interpretive communities."

Trimbur, J. (1989). Consensus and difference in collaborative learning. College English, 51, 602-616.

Trimbur discusses Rorty's notion of conversation: The purpose of collaborative learning as described by Bruffee (1986) and Wiener (1986) is to help students experience the process of negotiating and reaching consensus. This goal has been attacked on the ground that it subjects individual students to leveling peer pressure. But since individuals must face peer pressure as part of living in society, collaborative learning can help them learn how to deal with it. Moreover, the collaborative approach can teach students how to deflect control by authorities to which they might be subject as isolated individuals. Some critics of collaborative learning caution that consensus may actually be acquiescence to prevailing social attitudes; consensus would thus reproduce the oppressions of a nonegalitarian social structure. Most people participate in a variety of overlapping discourses that often come into conflict. Thus, a collaborative classroom would treat "dissensus," however muted, as the normal state of affairs in most discourse communities and would teach students to think of genuine consensus not as something achievable but as a commitment to engage in polyvocal conversations as free from relations of domination as possible.

Trimbur, J., & Braun, L. (1992). Laboratory life and the determination of authorship. In J. Forman (Ed.), New visions of collaborative writing (19-36). Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook.

This essay argues that the collaborative organization of scientific work has produced structural and epistemological ambiguities about the nature of individuals' contributions to common projects and the credit to which they are entitled. By analyzing authorship in a number of scientific papers, the essay explores the social processes of negotiation and networking that allocate credit to individual scientists.

Tuman, M. C. (Ed.). (1992). Literacy online: The promise (and peril) of reading and writing with computers. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. 

Explores the scope of how computers reshape not just how we read and write, but by extension how we teach these skills and how we understand the basic terms of reading, writing, and text. Discusses how computers are changing text forms, teaching practices, and administrative structures. Argues that the full promise of the new technology lies in the power of ordinary users to exercise direct control, often through computer manipulation, of our cultures' dominant signs and symbols. Includes two essays that explore how the use of computers contributes to "new forms of critical thought."

Vygotsky, L. S. (1987). Mind in society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Children don't just imitate or absorb knowledge; they go through a process of constructing it. Scaffolding lets learners go beyond what they could do alone.

Wilson, B. G., Ed. (1996). Constructivist learning environments: Case studies in instructional design. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Educational Technology.

Wilson defines a constructivist learning environment as "a place where learners may work together and support each other as they use a variety of tools and information resources in their guided pursuit of learning goals and problem-solving activities." (p. 5) The definition serves as a launching point for the book, though it does not have universal acceptance by the authors of the book.

Ziegel, R. J. (1995). Ten seniors writing (twelfth grade, peer response groups). Unpublished Dissertation, New York University.

A qualitative interview study of the experiences of student writers in classrooms designed within a constructivist writing process framework as advocated by, among others, Moffett, Britton, and Elbow. The participants were ten 12th-grade students in a suburban high school who had in earlier grades been taught by the researcher but were not at the time of the study. A central focus was the student writers' sense of audience. The most strongly voiced theme to emerge from the interview data concerned students' negative feelings about peer response groups. Participants generally found these of little value when they were assigned to groups not of their choosing.

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