Collaborative Recommendation Report

The Collaborative Recommendation Report and Presentation

This assignment has three parts:

First, working collaboratively, write a "formal" or "long" report that makes a specific recommendation to a specific audience. The report should more or less follow the format that is outlined in our reading.

Second, again working collaboratively, make an oral presentation with PowerPoint materials about your group's report.

Third, working independently, write a brief memo from you to me that discusses the project, including your assessment of your colleagues' collaborative efforts.

Here are some things to think about:

You will be working in groups of four or five. I will let you more or less form your own groups, but the groups must be four or five people and everyone needs to be in a group. Collaboration can of course be tricky. We will talk about this in class, but I would encourage you to keep in mind the advice offered in our assigned reading about collaboration in the workplace. As part of the collaboration effort, keep in mind that not everyone has to do everything, but everyone in the group needs to make significant contributions. See below regarding the memo and assessment of your colleagues' collaborative efforts. Someone from your group will have to inform me via email who is in your particular group no later than the end of class on March 31.
The subject of your recommendation should be something that has to do with what your group members anticipate to be their professional work situation. As we've discussed in class, this might mean a recommendation about a particular curricular approach for teachers, about a kind of training that ought to be conducted in a professional setting, etc. If your group has a hard time coming up with a recommendation to make in a professional setting, consider making a recommendation that has to do with Eastern Michigan University as an institution (parking, building projects, tuition, fees, transfer credit, etc.). Other than these basic guidelines, I'm fairly open-minded about the subject of your reports and presentations. However:
- I reserve the right to approve the topic of your project; and
- Once your group decides on a topic for your project, you cannot change your minds (so think carefully about this!).
You will need to let me know about the topic of your group's report and presentation no later than the beginning of class on April 5.
As you work on your report and presentation, you will want to have in mind a specific audience. For example, while this audience will have to include your classmates and instructor, it also will need to be directed to hypothetical school administrators, hypothetical managers in a business setting, not so hypothetical EMU administrators, etc.
As described in the assigned reading, your report needs to include the following parts:
- A "Letter of Transmittal," which states the purpose of the report.
- A title page.
- An abstract or "executive summary," which provides a brief overview of the problem raised in the report and the conclusions/recommendations.
- The report itself, which should include:
  - An introduction that explains the purpose and outlines the background of the issue being discussed in the report.
  - The body or "discussion" section of the report, which more or less is the bulk of this project and where you will clearly articulate the problems and reasons for the recommendation of your report.
  - The conclusion, where you articulate the recommendations of your report.
You don't need to include a "table of contents" for this report since it will be a bit shorter than the "long reports" described in our reading.
Keep in mind that your report needs to be written collectively but as if it were one author. As such, you will not want to have sections in your report attributed to particular writers, you will want to decide as a group certain "writerly" issues (third or first person, past or present tense, etc.), and you may want to assign someone in your group with the task of being the "editor" who brings nitwit to the document.
As appropriate, you will need to conduct some basic research to support the recommendations you are making. The kind of research you will conduct will vary according to the nature of the subject of your report's recommendations and it might include traditional library research, internet research, or interviews. You should use an appropriate style guide for citing this material (either MLA or APA will be fine for our purposes).
It's difficult to answer the questions "how long should it be" and "how many sources will we need" since this depends a great deal on the nature of your recommendation. But generally speaking, I think your report should be the equivalent of a 10 to 12 page typed and double-spaced essay, and I suspect you will need between six and 12 different sources to support your point. This might seem like a lot, but considering the fact that you are working in groups of four or five, this really isn't that much.
Each group will make a 15 or so minute presentation about their recommendation report using PowerPoint. I am still investigating our computer options, but you should be aware that there is a chance (albeit a slim one) that you will have to make overhead slides for this presentation.

This presentation should not be a word-for-word reading of your paper-based report; rather, it should more or less be an oral version of your report. Not everyone in your group needs to speak during this presentation, but everyone should have some part in the project.
Your group will hand in a copy of your collaborative recommendation report on the day you give your presentation, which will be either April 12 or April 14.
Finally, on the day your group's recommendation report is due, each group member needs to hand in a memo from you to me that describes the process of collaboration. This memo is a little different from ones that you've done in the past. In this memo assessing the collaborative process, I would like you to a) describe what work you contributed to the group; b) what work do you think others in the group contributed to your project; and c) what grade do you think people in the group ought to receive. The goal of this assessment process is to more or less keep everyone "honest" and accountable for the collaborative activities. I will factor in these responses into the final grade for this project.