From Cooperative Learning to Collaborative Writing in the Legal Writing Classroom

This article traces the theory and practice behind the use of collaborative work at Northwestern. Section I summarizes the academic theory underlying the use of collaborative work, including the pedagogical and other benefits for students and faculty. Section II addresses the use of graded and ungraded cooperative and collaborative work—both inside and outside of the classroom—and how this work provides students with a context for the graded collaborative writing they perform later in the semester. Section III focuses on methods with respect to the collaboratively written graded assignments. Section IV reports the results of the survey of students' collaborative writing experience. Finally, Section V looks to the future and discusses planned changes.