I’ve been marking the collaborative essays that my Grade 12 University level students recently submitted, and I must say that I’m thrilled.

Polished, perfect, thesis-argument-conclusion papers, they are not.

What they are is simply wonderful. They represent some of the finest thinking that I have seen expressed in high school writing to date.

In brief, the collaborative essay assignment asked students to select an interesting question about Hamlet and then, using the class blog portal, find other students who expressed different ideas about that question. Each student was expected to either work directly with or at least quote extensively from other students’ writing on the topic to create a unified final essay.

And the essays are truly fantastic to read. My hunch is that because they are in dialogue with one another, students are not intimidated by “expert” or “critical” opinions. Instead, faced with alternative opinions, students are considering the ideas, weighing the evidence, and then constructing their own arguments in response. The resulting essays have genuine purpose, instead of artificially constructed and horribly bland theses.

My hope is that they will remember this experience and be able to translate the thinking and writing to situations where they are dealing with published critics’ opinions.