Cinnabar and Alabaster

passages
4. the "nuts and bolts" concerns of how to conduct writing groups "only become significant in the context of a clearly articulated set of beliefs about how people learn to write and why we teach writing in the first place. only some beliefs about writing and writing instruction imply the use of small groups. in fact, we think that there are good reasons why some teachers do not want to use small groups in their classrooms, as well as well-articulated rationales for teaching which argue against their use. some teachers, we acknowledge, really ought not to use small groups at all because the beliefs that they hold about writing don't match the opportunities small groups offer."
76. small group work can be confusing for students b/c it's still part of a system of individual evaluation--if "performance and evaluation" are the goals of school activities, group evaluation threatens "injustice"--might lead to "nothing other than a watered-down version of what i could do better by myself, or it brought every member down to the lowest common denominator ('the laziest') in the group." in the authors' past experience, "group work was never perceived by teachers or students as serious learning"
77. the mixed messages of being assigned group work: "guiding and organizing a small group and being a learning, contributing member of that group" can seem like very different roles; in the authors' experience, "[school] groups had nothing to do with the group work i saw on my grandparents' farm in oklahoma. we didn't plan our time, we didn't meet over food and drink, and we didn't feel free to choose our roles"
89. an ineffective (but very common) group model: "students as substitute teachers who did some work for the teacher and supposedly had the same level of knowledge about the topics and organization as the teachers"
90. the revelation: after reading elbow "i changed from using small groups as collaborators or as critics to using small groups for response. a peer-response group acts as a group of honest, critical, yet encouraging readers. readers tell the student writer what they understood, what confused them, what they think the writer is saying or trying to say. then the writer decides what to do about revising toward those responses" <--(responders rather than collaborators: a lot of the collaborative learning/writing ppl would see this kind of response--executed while the writing was still in process & so likely reflected in the shape the writing takes on--as collaboration, not as an alternative to it. these authors don't define "collaboration," so i don't know how they'd identify it as distinct.)
93. definitions of "success" are key: "in the past, a successful group, for me, had been a group which did what i would do--responded to texts in the same teacherly ways, forming the same teacherly relationship between group members. now, instead of seeing small groups as off-task or a failure, i saw small groups as a locus for writerly behavior"--which includes getting to know one another, establishing commonality, & talking about things in many different ways.
97. authors advise keeping groups all semester whenever possible, to allow trust to develop and conflicts to be experienced, worked through, and learned from, even if/when never solved.
106. bringing groups' individual conflicts into whole-class discussions to get suggestions from others about how a conflict might be handled is also a good way to teach effective group interaction.