The Case Study Project: Building A Community/workplace Writing Opportunity For Students (4)

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Phase Five: Writing Teams on a Mission
After reading one another's responses, members of each writing team cull their observations about the materials they have been working with to share their observations with one another. They begin to build a plan for the document they will create for their client, considering the following two questions:
1. Based on your individual observations and analysis, what visual elements from these documents do you think you should Omega Replica include in your document redesign and why?
2. Based on your individual observations and analysis, what language (words, phrases, slogans, etc.) do you think you should include in your document redesign and why?

After these conversations, students work together to build a plan for the new document. They then develop a collaboratively written business letter about their strategy to share with either the teacher or the client (or both). In Katherine's class, the students wrote a collaborative letter outlining the poster they would be designing for the UB Program. These letters, addressed ...
... to the UB staff, were written to help the organization to see whether their current materials were communicating the mission of UB to their potential audience and to open conversation with the UB director in case he had questions about the team's approach to the poster project. The letters also gave Katherine a better sense of each group's plan so that she could assess and monitor their progress.

Phase Six: Drafting and Revising— Conversations in the Classroom

As the writing teams collaboratively draft their documents, we often talk in class about the importance of "visual rhetoric," or the ways that visuals and words work together to make meaning (George; Hocks). As the students design this document, then, they are applying what they are learning to the collaborative task before them, talking about how to balance the text and the visuals so that one element does not overwhelm the other, and they talk about how to use color and font strategically to communicate effectively to the document's intended audience. They also consider how an audience might respond by asking the other teams for feedback as they develop drafts of the document.

With the UB Case Study Project, Katherine asked writing teams to project their poster drafts on an LCD projector while the other teams offered feedback in a whole-class workshop setting. The benefit of doing the class workshop is its expediency (especially in cases where time is a factor) and the opportunity for each team to present the rationale for the design and to hear feedback from multiple teams at once. Presenting group-designed plans for action is another common workplace activity in many professions.

Throughout the drafting process, we ask students to maintain notes and hand in official minutes of their meetings (or post them online). The minutes are a new genre for them to learn, and they also help us as teachers to keep track of their progress and to head off any difficulties that they may be encountering. Students learn to write the minutes for two intended audiences: (1) for the writing teams to see what was discussed and decided on during class, to facilitate and distribute writing tasks more evenly, and for the teams to communicate their progress to the teacher. Again, keeping meeting minutes is another important workplace literacy skill.

Phase Seven: Final Presentations

In the final phase of the Case Study Project, writing teams develop a polished draft of their client's document. They then present these documents to the class and, ideally, to the client as well. If clients are able to attend the presentation of the final drafts, they can offer immediate feedback and points for Omega Replica Watches discussion; if not, the clients can offer feedback in the form of a letter to the writing teams. We will note that there have been occasions where some clients have not provided immediate or written feedback, but in those cases, the teacher can often receive verbal feedback from the clients that he or she can relay to each writing team. While this situation is not ideal, oral, informal feedback is prefer-able to no feedback.