Elena Oncevska
This poster is titled ‘Outside the comfort zone: An experiment in group argumentative writing’. Having noticed that students working with their friends on academic writing tasks when tasks required group work sometimes led to forming cliques which negatively impacted both the class dynamics and their academic work (e.g. with the same writing problems recurring among the members of the group), I decided to conduct an informal classroom experiment. For the purpose of writing a group argumentative mini-essay, I asked my students to get together with colleagues they had not worked with before. Risking to interfere with their friendship patterns which often function as a powerful source of motivation, I set out to explore the value of getting students to work outside their comfort zone for the sake of additional exposure to “new” approaches to academic thinking, learning and writing. In this poster presentation I will discuss the main findings of my informal classroom experiment, foregrounding my students’ perceptions about the format of group work used and suggesting directions for the improvement of academic writing instruction along similar, collaborative lines.
Video of 3-minute talk and photo of poster below: Back to Teachers Research! home
This poster is titled ‘Outside the comfort zone: An experiment in group argumentative writing’. Having noticed that students working with their friends on academic writing tasks when tasks required group work sometimes led to forming cliques which negatively impacted both the class dynamics and their academic work (e.g. with the same writing problems recurring among the members of the group), I decided to conduct an informal classroom experiment. For the purpose of writing a group argumentative mini-essay, I asked my students to get together with colleagues they had not worked with before. Risking to interfere with their friendship patterns which often function as a powerful source of motivation, I set out to explore the value of getting students to work outside their comfort zone for the sake of additional exposure to “new” approaches to academic thinking, learning and writing. In this poster presentation I will discuss the main findings of my informal classroom experiment, foregrounding my students’ perceptions about the format of group work used and suggesting directions for the improvement of academic writing instruction along similar, collaborative lines.
Video of 3-minute talk and photo of poster below: Back to Teachers Research! home
