The Task

For the first 10 weeks of the course, spanning Projects 1 and 2, we will use Friday class meetings to work on the Writing Partners activity. For this sustained collaborative writing activity, you will be assigned 2 partners who will comprise your peer writing group for the duration of the activity. Each Friday, the class will be given a writing prompt, and you will work with your writing group to collaboratively compose a response to the prompt. You are encouraged to use a shared Microsoft Word document, which I will set up and share with your group in advance of Friday's class meeting, to compose your response, and then post the response to our class blog before the end of the class period.

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The Terms

Length

Responses should be at least 250 words long in order to meet the assessment criteria listed below

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Format

Responses will be composed in a shared online document and, when completed, posted to the class blog

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Assessment Criteria

Individual grades for this activity will be a composite of group participation grades (75% of your project grade) and group grades on blog posts (25% of your project grade).

 

During each Friday class meeting for the first 10 weeks of the semester, I will be looking for you to do the following:

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• Actively participate in verbal discussions with your partners

• Contribute to written discussions that comprise each blog post

• Generously listen to your partners' perspectives

• Respond to and build on your partners' contributions to the discussion

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In each blog post, I will be looking for you to do the following:

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• Provide a focused and coherent response to the given prompt

• Incorporate knowledge from both course materials and your own personal experiences

• Engage with multiple perspectives