Abstract
Faculty face increasing demands for service and teaching, resulting in decreased time for scholarship despite high expectations for academic productivity. These competing demands result in many faculty finding it to challenging to engage consistently in academic writing. This article briefly overviews the literature on academic writing groups, with attention to their value and challenges with implementation and success. We then offer a case example of our own interprofessional writing group that has been meeting and evolving for the past five years. To maximize the benefits of academic writing groups, we offer a psychologically informed framework that attends to three key dialectics: flexibility versus structure, person-centeredness versus team-based, and acceptance versus change. This psychologically informed framework recognizes that effective writing groups differ from one another and vary within themselves over time in terms of where they fall on each dialectical continuum. Based on our experiences as faculty in an interprofessional writing group invested in navigating these dialectics combined with the pertinent literature, we offer specific strategies for Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) staff to consider when implementing a psychologically-informed model in a manner that promotes teaching, learning, scholarly productivity, connection, and well-being. The effectiveness of these strategies will require further investigation of both processes and outcomes using qualitative and quantitative methods.