Expert answer
Collaborative writing is a great tool for helping all kids write better, including those who struggle. The process can involve collaboration between teacher and students or between students and students.
Teacher-student collaboration often begins with the teacher modeling or leading an interactive writing exercise. The important part here is that kids don’t end up being strapped in their seats doing nothing! As the teacher structures the activity, kids engage by generating ideas, helping to organize the ideas, and coming up with the ideas for writing.
Student-to-student collaboration can be a structured situation. Sometimes that can be pairing one student who’s a stronger writer with a student who’s a weaker writer. And sometimes it can be reciprocal, with both kids giving feedback to help each other.
You can also use these two things in tandem. Teachers can model an interactive writing session with kids, and then the kids work together to apply the same things that teachers are doing.
The nice thing is that it makes any activity more fun if you do it with somebody else. So it’s more motivating. Second, you get extra help, either from the teacher or the other student in terms of doing it. And third, one of the things that happens when you work with another person, is that you see how they carry out that task. It makes it more likely that you might incorporate something that they were doing in your own approach to writing.