Tutor-instructor
collaboration project
Spring, 1999
1. Analysis of tutoring session with student Z, on March
29, 1999
Z and I worked together for about 25 minutes on her paper for English 101. Three
categories of analysis emerged: what went well, what could have been better,
and what wasn't touched at all.
First, one of the main things I try to achieve in tutoring is a concise, clear
feeling in the student's mind as to which way to proceed: both with the assignment
at hand and towards better writing in general. It can be tempting to try to
cover a wide variety of aspects with a students work--planning, research, organization
of ideas, sentence structure, spelling, computer-based formatting and presentation,
attitudes toward school and study, gossip and commiseration over the weary troubles
of life, some more useful than others in different tutoring sessions. As one
gathers experience in academic work, there also accumulate lectures on these
topics (mini- to maxi-) in memory, ready for recall and replay upon those patient
enough to listen. As this list has perhaps tediously exemplified, it is neither
possible nor desirable to delve into each of the above in detail, especially
when so many of our clients come to the Writing Center not for a whole curriculum--which
they already have with their other English courses--but come instead for that
little extra benefit of advice that might help them understand a little more
from other courses, and in the end earn a little bit higher grade.
With each student I tutor, i first ask a couple questions to help me decide
how to focus the tutoring session, including these:
What class are you in?
Who is the instructor?
What kind of advice did you come for today?
(If student seeks assistance with a specific assignment) May I see the written
directions for this assignment from the instructor?
(If student seeks assistance with a specific assignment) When is the assignment
due, and how much time do you want to spend working on it before that time?
These questions help me decide how to proceed for the following reasons.
Class level and focus help determine likely topics and language requirements,
for example ESL 4 and English 101 will usually be reading materials of great
difference in length and complexity, and further English 101 will more often
be concerned with implied, implicational, and metaphorical meaning,whereas ESL
4might more likely focus on interpretation of literal meaning, vocabulary, and
sentence structure. If a student simply handed over a one or two page writing
sample, and a tutor began to tutor without knowing which of those two courses
the student were enrolled in, it could become frustrating for both if the session
focused on language requirements of the opposite course. The tutor might bounce
among the aspects of language study delineated above, looking for signs of understanding,
and worst case, settle on gossip as the only point of communication.
Next, as for having some familiarity with various instructors' styles and foci,
knowing the student's instructor can help focus a tutoring session: for example,
some instructors give very specific guidelines in essay structure, so even if
a student from one of these instructor's courses tells me that her assignment
is simply to "write about our story," I know that advising the student on any
type of essay structure that might come to mind will not do. Sometimes the most
helpful focus for a tutoring session can be to carefully read the instructor's
directions together. Here, one of those mini-lectures described above:
Cat is spelled perfectly; as a sentence, it's a fragment.
One might write a beautiful poem, but as an essay, it's a guaranteed failure.
These intentionally silly examples are exaggerated for effect, but through direct
discussion with various instructors, I have received not only ideas about the
types of assignments they use and how their students can best succeed with them,
but also more general insight into what they hope for their students' learning
and progress, and even advice on how to tutor specific students. The question
asking students to see the written directions from the instructor are more assignment
specific, but also are a way to cut back through any generational decay that
might occur as filters of memory, time, and impression might be applied by anyone
interpreting another's description of a project.
Asking a student what type of advice she came for and how much more time and
effort she intends to spend as well helps me focus. While some of the most satisfying
exchanges over the years in the Writing Centers have been with students who
after many tutoring sessions in essay structure have happily completed a course
that began with failing grades, or passed the essay section of the CBEST, many
students come at the last minute for minor polish and are uninterested in anything
more. Others come with very specific interest in specific aspects within language
study described at top and would find uninteresting a focus on any other. Some
fine souls even come to the Writing Centers with grand ideas about the beauty
and honor of study and language and hope to be taken on a tour of literature.
If I were to ignore students' goals and proceed with what I thought were important,
students might a) ignore anything requiring more than 20 minutes
of revision, rendering any more involved advice a waste of effort on my part,
no matter how well constructed; b) skip class or miss a due date
attempting major overhaul of work sufficient for the assignment; c)
consider the Writing Centers unresponsive to their needs and be less interested
to return; d) abandon brilliant promise in literary sensibility,
thus robbing the future of the works that might save the world--what a shame!
For those who have struggled along thus far, recall that this first point was
supposed to be a explanation of what had gone well in the tutoring session with
Z, in this case why the tutoring session had achieved a clear concise focus.
The above assessment, luckily, takes far less time to do in one's mind than
it does to describe and explain it in writing. Examining the assignment sheet
which the student had filed away but produced upon request revealed a series
of points to consider "as you prepare to write;" see the assignment page under
#3 below and the student's paper under #4. These points became the focus of
our session. I labeled them A to H and on a separate
sheet of paper listed the corresponding letters and my evaluation of the student's
efforts toward each; again this sheet is included below as well in #5. To make
this long story a little shorter, A and B suggest
that the introduction is more explicit than the conclusion and that the student
work on making the restatement of thesis in words on the page rather than implied.
Second, C and D both address questions of audience:
who is it, and what does the writer hope the essay will cause the audience to
know, do, or believe? The question mark at C means that I could not tell who
the audience was intended to be. The second sentence of D suggests that the
action recommended in the student's penultimate paragraph is not necessarily
requested of the audience, however, the necessarily again points
out my questioning as to the identity of the intended audience.
These points of strengthening conclusion and reconsidering audience were determined
by first examining the assignment and noticing the instructor's focus therein
on organization and structure of ideas and rhetorical orientation. Second, when
asking the student, she indicated that essay style and structure were her preferred
topics for the tutoring session. These two points also seemed reasonable in
their number and complexity for a student to comprehend and manage before another
tutoring session while also providing a fair amount of challenge.
For the reader's information, I numbered the paragraphs on the student's paper,
used check marks to count colorful details, and wrote an advisory comment on
the title. These were the only marks I made on the paper aside from drawing
the blanks where I asked her to briefly indicate the purpose of each paragraph.
Other marks used for different purposes and their use could provide for other
analyses.
After that long description of what I thought was well done, here find a much
briefer analysis of what could have been done better and what was not addressed
at all. First, note letters F, G, and H on my comments page. All three of these
may leave the impression that these aspects of the assignment have been adequately
addressed, or from a hopeful student's point of view might appear to be saying,
"You've done a good/fine/perfect job on these points." This is an impression
I'd prefer not to give students, as I try to avoid putting the Writing Centers
in a position of guessing or second-guessing instructors' evaluations. Doing
so would be counter-productive for several reasons. First and foremost, the
Writing Centers are not a sort of dry cleaners, where students drop off papers
to be fixed. Some students are surprised to hear that it would be wrong, even
illegal, for the Centers to "correct" their work. The Centers provide advice,
assistance, and the benefit of a second eye, an eye more experienced than the
student in various ways, depending on the staff member.
The Writing Centers' effect should be predominately on the student's development
as a writer, rather than on any particular paper or assignment. Second, if the
Writing Centers were to declare all or part of a student's work to be perfect/A+/in
need of no further improvement and the instructor were to subsequently recommend
improvement on that work or subpart thereof, and the hopeful student were to
side with the evaluation more personally admirable, i.e. if the student were,
on the basis of a tutoring session, to decide that her instructor were wrong
or unfair in any way would, first, not help the student progress, and, second,
would pit the Writing Centers and department instructors in an antagonistic
position unhealthy for all. Third, while commiseration might be comforting,
giving students license to persist with unhelpful self-defense mechanisms that
block progress would defeat our purpose as tutors. These dire conditions were
hopefully not in any way involved in the tutoring session here described, but,
as there is always room for improvement, I wish that I'd made it clearer that
our session focused on her conclusion and consideration of audience because
they seemed to be the areas where the most effect on structure and rhetorical
strength could be achieved for one day's session and not because everything
else was perfect.
As for the category of not dealt with at all, the student's paper contained
several minor grammatical and punctuation errors that did not impede my understanding
of her meaning. These were not addressed in detail because of the aforementioned
focus; however, I do now wish that I had followed my usual habit in such circumstances
and told the student about their existence and my reasons for not covering them
at length at that time.
2. Analysis of discussion with instructor on April 5, 1999
First, I described the tutoring session and asked for the instructor's feedback.
Next, the instructor was queried as to general advice on working in the Writing
Centers and for tips specifically for our helping her students better understand
their course and earn higher grades.
Luckily for the instructor, she was not dealt such a heavy description of the
tutoring session as the one above but mainly informed of the focus on her list
"as you begin to write," particularly on the conclusion and audience aspects.
She agreed that the focus seemed sensible, if the student had a strong thesis,
"direct and clearly stated."
We discussed the outlining technique and how it can be useful in evaluating
thesis and argument. She replied that students' biggest writing problem in English
101 is often with organization, first in creating a solid thesis, then making
all points in an essay support the thesis, and presenting those points logically.
The instructor had not seen Z's essay yet, but we looked at the revised version
together. Z had changed her title, and the next-to-last paragraph was more specific
in what steps were recommended, but the intended audience still seemed unclear.
In fact, the more specific the nature of recommendations, the more clear it
appeared that the intended audience was not those of whom most of the action
was recommended, i.e., homeless shelters--in Z's paper, "they [shelters] should
." The instructor described the position as a "we" paper.
Her general advice on tutoring was to help students first by discussing their
thesis and argument structure. She suggested that we help students develop their
revision skills by asking them to be very specific in asking for advice. She
said she tells her students not to walk in the Writing Centers and hand us their
paper, expecting us to "make it better," but to plan ahead specific questions
to discuss with tutors.
3. Instructor's original assignment: http://www.snorko.org/cyberwrite/eng69/nmk.gif
4. Z's paper: http://www.snorko.org/cyberwrite/eng69/zpaper.html
5.
Tutor's notes: http://www.snorko.org/cyberwrite/eng69/ztutor.gif
P.S.
Thank you for your patient consideration, and a special note to the other staff
members who undertake this project: I took the opportunity to include here a
variety of mini-lectures on tutoring and the nature of writing centers. Do not
feel expected to produce such a long boring story: a couple paragraphs after
the tutoring session and then again after discussion with the instructor will
be fine for this effort.
