Laura's Stuff

course reflections

2009-12-14T17:25:00.001-05:00

Update...
As I'm finishing up my last two research papers for other classes, I've noticed I have become much more prepared for papers than I used to be. My desk is a huge mess of notecards and post its and notebooks with quotes. Yes, it's a mess, but deep down there's organization to it. And more so than I used to have. So I think a combination of doing so much writing to prepare for my paper for this class and seeing other writers' sometimes lack of organization has actually sunk in with me. It seems about right that I would get it my senior year =).

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My writing process has begun to change in terms of just getting it out. I still need to work on it, but watching students fight over tiny details helped me realize it's more important to get out ideas instead of focusing on specific words and stuff.
Also, having to post drafts to the blog really helped me just write. I honestly have been pretty bad at doing drafts before. I try to write everything almost perfectly the first time. Shame on me, I know. But having to put them on the blog and knowing everyone else is too helped.

That ^ relates to my finished products... which I "finish" (at least in some sense) sooner/easier, so I have more time and sanity to finish finishing, or revising and editing. So that's changed.

As I said in class, I think I'm hyper-sensitive of my coaching right now - especially when I don't know what to do. So I need to do some free coaching to figure out what I naturally do. And then I'd like to do some more reflection on how I've changed or what I still need to change.

I've definitely become more aware that in coaching conversation, variety is key.... Saying things different ways and have other people/resources around to help with that communication.

Doing the outline for the Lunsford essay helped me really wrap my head around it, so I think that means for me, it's important to re-say what I read. I think I brought some of that to my sessions because I tried to get the writer to say what he/she was thinking or whatever.

ma philosophie, the threequel (bog 22)

2009-12-13T21:48:00.001-05:00

This is my revision as of 7:30 Monday night. =)

A writing center is a home for writers, and a writer is anyone at our university who writes. As students are the main groups of writers who visit the center, we are most geared toward them. Every writer has different needs, and our center is willing to address each one. But our ultimate goal is to help those who come in learn to confidently navigate the writing process. We believe that writers benefit greatly from finding their own answers, and we also know that a collaborative environment is invaluable. Therefore, we seek to share with each writer how he can learn from himself and the writers around him.

Institutional responsibilities

The institution should provide the necessary funding for tutors, administrators, faculty, space, furniture, and resources for the center. The number of tutors and the amount of space will reflect the amount of students who use the center. The center will employ a director, a few head tutors, peer tutors, and a few faculty members.

The center will be in one open, central location on campus. It will have small tables as well as larger tables to accommodate various kinds of sessions. The center will also be equipped with computers, the number of which will also reflect how many people come to the center. The computers must have Internet access as well as Microsoft Office.

The center will also have a library of valuable resources to writers. It will include dictionaries, thesauruses, handbooks, manuals for all styles of writing, books with writing strategies and prompts, grammar books, and sample writings from all stages of the writing process.

Faculty responsibilities

A few faculty members who would like to be a part of the writing center will be compensated for tutoring a few hours a week. They are valuable to the center because some students enjoy working with a faculty member, faculty members can get a better understanding of how students approach the writing process, and other tutors can also learn from a faculty member coaching strategies as well as what the faculty generally expects from its students. A faculty coach can come from any discipline in the university.

All professors teaching freshman/general education required writing courses should provide their syllabi/assignment sheets. They should also provide a sample paper for each assignment that meets their standards. Other professors, particularly those who make writing assignments a large percentage of the semester's work, are encouraged to also provide assignment sheets and sample essays.

Too, all professors are encouraged to recommend the writing center for any written assignment; however, no student may be forced to go to the center. This means students' grades are independent of their visits to the center. Any improvement after visits may be reflected in a grade, but a grade may not simply improve or worsen based solely on a student's visiting or not visiting the center.

Finally, if a faculty member disagrees with or has a question about something done in the writing center, he or she should approach the writing center director but not a tutor or faculty tutor.

Director responsibilities

The director's administrative responsibilities include hiring and training tutors, holding regular meetings for ongoing training and tutor feedback, dealing with faculty-tutor relations, observing characteristics/needs of students who visit the center and adjusting services likewise, and being a part of the day-to-day life of the center.

In hiring tutors, the director should try to have at least one representative from all the school's disciplines. Also, the director should take into account not only the writing abilities of a potential tutor but also his or her communication skills as they are both essential. As a part of tutor training, the director should brief tutors on the various approaches to writing centers and individual session, explaining where their own center fits in. The director should also address the specific needs of the school's students, focusing on any non-standard populations like ESL students, deaf students, those in remedial programs, etc. Another core part of training should be looking at and talking about the tutors' personality types and how they will work together and with students. Along with the different types of people, the training should address the different types of assignments. Tutors who have specific expertise in one kind of assignment will be encouraged to coach other tutors who may not feel as familiar or comfortable.

The director should negotiate any problems between a faculty member and a tutor or even the whole center. The director should present to the professor the common practices of the center, defending them with other research and literature. The director and professor may also consult session notes (see Tutor responsibilities) when pertinent. When a tutor needs help or constructive criticism, the director will meet with him or her in a private matter.

To determine if the center needs to be adjusted in terms of of its budget or services, the director will monthly review who comes into the center and what they do. Important details for these reviews include how many students are coming in and what their special needs are. These reviews will justify the need for the center as well as any expansions.

On a day-to-day basis, the director will be aware of what's going on. He or she should also regularly coach sessions. The director will also be easily accessible for any difficulties a tutor may have with a particular session. As a part of ongoing training, the director will conduct regular meetings for tutors to reflect upon and discuss their work in a collaborative environment.

Tutor Responsibilities

The center will have some head tutors who have more experience and will be available when other tutors have questions or problems. All tutors are responsible for conducting sessions, but they are not responsible for editing or proof-reading students' papers. After each session, tutors will make notes about what was done in the session and any other information the tutors feels is relevant (like any disagreements). These notes are for the tutor's benefit because they will serve as evidence if a professor has a complaint.

Tutors will be professional at all times. They will treat students with respect. They will refrain from discussing personal opinions about professors and students when students are in the center.

Also, tutors will be encouraged to conduct writing center research with the director's approval.

Student Responsibilities

Students may come to the center for any kind of writing assignment. They should bring hard copies or electronic copies of any writing they have to the session. While we are willing to be help at any stage of the writing process, we strongly encourage students do not bring in last minute work; we want them to have ample time to produce good work. Students may not ask tutors to edit or proof-read their papers. Students will treat tutors with respect.

Students should understand that they have complete ownership of what they write. They are not required to take any suggestions a tutor has, nor do their grades pend on a tutoring session itself.

draft of everything! (blog 21)

2009-12-06T20:42:00.001-05:00

I haven’t changed my data analysis much from the previous draft, which I definitely plan on doing once I get a better grip how to do it. My discussion will (hopefully) reflect the revisions of the analysis.

And my lit review is still long, but I don’t think it’ll be too hard to cut it down more. (Hey, I already cut it by 2/3 - and that's with new info added!)

How’s my intro? Do I need to define the loss more? Is my problem/research question clear enough? Do I need to hold off on explaining my findings? Need to more specifically include categories of classification in discussion section? Does my conclusion answer my question?

Introduction

Every writing tutor has found herself in a moment of uncertainty, a moment of panic, mind either racing or empty. Even the best of tutors will come to a point in the lesion where she does not know an answer or the right thing to do or how to do it. In these moments, she is at a loss of words or actions. I have researched what happens in these moments, and I have found that there are indeed trends in losses, and when a tutor is aware of these trends, she can better handle the loss or even prevent it. Also, a loss can be not only a point of conflict but also a time when a tutor can learn from her student.

Review of the Literature

Although in writing about __________, many people have used a tutor’s loss as an example (?), no research has been done that specifically pays attention to why losses happen, what happens, and how the tutor gets out of them. Elizabeth Boquet comes very close to talking about this in her article Intellectual Tug-of-War: Snapshots of Life in the Center where she looks at moments when tutors struggle. She shows that sometimes, there is no recovery and tutors are left with an internal battle of perception, wondering if they seem like bad tutors because they did not resolve a conflict. Another loss revolving around perception happens when a tutor must negotiate between her own goals and responsibilities, the student’s needs, a professor’s agenda, and to which expectation she wants to cater. While a tutor can choose one role to play and thus recover from the loss in the session, she may not be personally satisfied and therefore still at an internal loss with herself.

Brooke Ann Smith’s The Socratic method: The answer for the new tutor looks at how a tutor can ask broad questions to help a writer discover answers and ideas on his own. This method is effective even when the writer expects the tutor to provide all the answers and when the tutor is at a loss; however, the writer in Smith’s example is already observant and comfortable with the conventions of a college paper.

In her article Cultural Conflicts in the Writing Center: Expectations and Assumptions of ESL Students, Muriel Harris says that writing tutors and their ESL students have differing expectations about the routines of a writing session. She notes, tutors are trained to be collaborators, and ESL students come to a tutor for answers and solutions. She also discusses that as part of the cultural differences, ESL students may struggle with typical open-ended questions tutors ask because finding their own answers is a foreign exercise. Too, she explains that these different expectations will indeed create a conflict, or a loss. Harris also writes that ESL students respond positively to a tutor who is sympathetic or understanding about the challenges that come with learning English.

Finally, The Bedford Guide for Writing Tutors suggests that when a writer is at a loss, she should admit it, then get help from a textbook or handbook (modeling good practice for the student) or another tutor. When discussing grammar with a student, the authors advise tutors to being aware of their vocabulary as not all students will understand it. The authors also recommend that tutors have students read their papers aloud to find their own errors, and the recommend that tutors ask general questions to help students find an answer.

Methods

For my research, I conducted sessions in Kean University’s tutoring facilities. I did nothing special to manipulate my sessions; I conducted them as I normally would. I had some previous experience working part-time one semester a year ago at a writing center geared specifically for developmental writers at Charleston Southern University. But I still consider myself a fairly novice tutor. Also, I am a native speaker of English.

The sessions were an hour long each. Four of my seven sessions were with the same student, and the remaining three were with ESL students with varying levels of proficiency. Out of my seven sessions, I documented 10 cases where I was at a loss. After each session, I used a series of prompts to reconstruct the loss. The prompts were a chronological outline of what happened, noting any preceding signals to the loss, the tutor’s and writer’s verbal and nonverbal actions during the loss, the details of the recovery, and both parties’ responses to the resolution.

In my these notes, I wrote down nonverbal cues signaling emotions or thoughts, and I tried to be as specific as I could about the situation and what was said during the loss.

Data Analysis

Case 1: Jen

Jen was an ESL student who had been studying the language for three semesters. She spoke quietly and with a noticeable accent, so at times I struggled to audibly understand her. She brought in a midterm paper that her professor had marked up, and she wanted to revise it.

I quickly looked over her paper and saw several different kinds of problems, but the first paragraph in particular was difficult for me to understand – I could tell her paper was about perceptions of obesity, but I could not determine whether or not she was arguing that obesity should affect personal opinions. My confusion about her topic was my loss, and I decided to use Socratic questioning by asking, “I don’t understand what you mean here. Can you explain it?” She answered by rereading some of the phrases in that paragraph over but never giving me the clarification I was looking for. This exchange is an example of the conflicting expectations Harris describes where I was aiming to help her with the overall writing process by using the Socratic method, but she was not as willing to engage in free conversation.

So the conflict in this situation was external between Jen and me and our different expectations. Ultimately I conformed to her expectations by taking a direct approach and telling her specific changes to make in her paper, but it did take me a long time to understand what she wanted to write. After we revised that paragraph, I felt self-conscious about how I handled myself; I knew I was supposed to be the expert, but I had not known all the answers, and I could tell from her sighs and raised eyebrows that she was frustrated and tired. At this point I was at an internal loss over perception, so I made an effort to rectify how I thought she may be negatively perceiving me by saying, “You’re doing a good job. I know this is really confusing, and sometimes I don’t even know the right answers.” Then she smiled and laughed and thanked me and said, “And you speak English!” And Harris’ research shows that ESL writers are appreciative when their coaches are sympathetic to the difficulties of learning the language, which Jen’s smile confirms.

Case 2: Stacey

Stacey was a senior English Education student who had four consecutive sessions with me. She typically brought in journals about or lesson plans for her student-teaching. She initially came in because her supervisor was very critical of her writing, especially her grammar, punctuation, and wordiness, and instructed her to seek tutoring. She was very self-motivated – she told me about the practices she was doing at home and the resources she was using improve her writing. Her directness in the sessions also indicated her initiative.

During our second session, we were looking at semicolons and colons she had used in a journal. I pointed out an example and said, “You don’t need this colon here. It’s unnecessary because the sentence just… flows right along… it’s a complete thought together.” She said, “Okay” and changed it, but she clearly had not understood because later in similar sentences, she did not always use colons correctly. The loss here was external in that I was not able to effectively explain the rules to her, but I also was in internal conflict because I was frustrated that I could not help her. At the end of the session, I asked if I could e-mail her some more information and examples for semicolons and colons, and she accepted. The next day, I e-mailed her with explanations and examples from Joseph Williams’ book Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace. She thanked me in a reply as well as in our next session, and I noticed in that next session that she had printed and highlighted the e-mail. In our following sessions, she used the two punctuation marks correctly, proving her understanding.

The resolution for this loss was staggered. In the session, I instructed her on how to fix the errors, but I was not satisfied because I knew she had not grown as a writer. So though it was unconventional, the second part of the resolution, going to an authority, helped me help Stacey conquer the colon.

(*I also want to work in to this how using a resource was helpful in two ways: it said it better and it was more of an authority – since Stacey and I are both senior English students, we were on a pretty even playing field (sort of…) and she sometimes disagreed with what I said even though it was pretty undisputable.)

** Also mention later session where I brought in handbook and avoided loss!)

Case 3: Stacey

The following losses happened during my first session with Stacey and they are surprising in terms of my topic because I was very passive in the resolution to the loss. As I already mentioned, Stacey was driven and certainly so from the very beginning. She sat down, pulled her papers out, and said her supervisor wanted her to work on grammar and writing. My first loss was very quick, and it was a loss of how to start the session. I wondered momentarily exactly what we should work on, for she had given me some pretty broad subject areas. Right after explaining why her supervisor sent her, she took the lead, pointing to a few specific paragraphs that she wanted to work on. This was a completely internal loss on my part because neither of us ever physically or verbally acknowledged it, and she resolved it without ever knowing something needed resolving, with which I was perfectly content. (blech I know that sentence is bad, but this is a draft. so there.)

The second loss, however, was anything but invisible. We came to a sentence that was long and wordy, so I suggested she revise it. As I talked aloud about the sentence, where its issues were and how they could possibly be fixed, she said, “No...,” not liking my ideas. This was an external loss between Stacey and me and our different opinions. After a few suggestions, I changed my mind and said, “You know, maybe it’s fine the way it is,” indicating we should move on. But once again, Stacy recovered my loss. She came up with her own revision and wrote it down. So while I did not intentionally ask a leading question, hoping to lead Stacey to her own answer, I did open the session up for her to … um… figure out on her own what needed to be done.

Discussion

From Jen’s session we can see that personality and background play a major role in a session with an ESL student and a native tutor. When a tutor is not aware of how the cultural differences conflict, she may walk right into a problematic situation for tutor and student. On the other hand, a tutor may pick up on stress signals from the student and make an effort to comfort the student even when the tutor has not read or heard that ESL student respond positively to praise and understanding. (combo of informed tutoring and responding to instincts.) (socratic method didn’t work)

Stacey’s sessions also shed light onto several aspects of a tutor’s loss. First, not all losses are completely resolved. In such a case, a tutor can try to settle the loss as much as possible during the session, perhaps just helping the student get through one assignment, and then the tutor can follow up with the student on the given subject through e-mail or even in a subsequent session.

Secondly, writing resources are incredibly useful during a loss about a rule or convention. They serve several purposes; they answer a tutor’s question, they answer a writer’s question, they provide answers than can be different or more clear than a tutor’s answers, and they may be perceived as having more official and authoritative answers.

Finally, Stacey was just one student who proved that students themselves may recover from and resolve a loss. In many of my sessions I was at a loss from the very beginning because I did not know how to start the session, but the students often initiated the direction for the session very quickly. The student may also recover from a more involved loss, like when I suggested changes and then recounted them. Here, all I had to do was point out an area for improvement and Stacey, as an attentive writer, came up with her own solution.

On a larger plane, I have found that conflict is always the heart of a loss, and that conflict may be a tutor’s own internal struggle or an external friction between tutor and writer. The conflict may be over perceptions, knowledge, or communication. A internal conflict is often one where the tutor dances between a professor’s opinions, a student’s desire, and a tutor’s philosophy. Another internal conflict may also be between how a tutor wants to be perceived and she is perceived. The most obvious loss may be one where a tutor simply does not know the answer to a student’s question. And a loss revolving communication is one where the tutor does not know how to explain something to a student or how to understand what the student is saying.

Conclusion

Because of the nature of my study, much is left to be researched about losses. A study of different tutors, for instance, would broaden the scope of what happens in a loss. More cases in general would have more statistical weight. Research on the most effective ways to handle a loss could also be conducted.

Despite these limitations, my study does offer useful insight into the world of the loss, for simply being aware of what causes a loss can help tutors prevent them. And on the other hand, realizing that a loss can be a moment for growth can help a tutor feel less anxious. So really, tutors should embrace their losses. They are inevitable, so when tutors take note of what kinds of losses they are prone to have, they become better tutors because they better understand themselves and the dynamics of the sessions they conduct. And when tutors notice trends in their losses, they can then anticipate problems they will face and be prepared for them.

on writing my philisophy

2009-12-04T14:01:00.000-05:00

I'm having a sort of hard time negotiating between the Ideal and the Real... Ideally, students won't be forced to come to the center. But in reality, it is probably pretty easy for a professor to at least make someone feel like she is being forced to go.
hmm.

data draft (blog 20)

2009-12-01T21:52:00.000-05:00

Data Analysis

Case 1: Jen

So the conflict in this situation was external, between Jen and me and our different expectations. Ultimately I conformed to her expectations by taking a direct approach and telling her specific changes to make in her paper, but it did take me a long time to understand what she wanted to say. After we revised that paragraph, I felt self-conscious about how I handled myself; I knew I was supposed to be the expert, but I had not known all the answers, and I could tell from her sighs and raised eyebrows that she was frustrated and tired. At this point I was at an internal loss over perception, so I made an effort to rectify how I thought she may be negatively perceiving me by saying, “You’re doing a good job. I know this is really confusing, and sometimes I don’t even know the right answers.” Then she smiled and laughed and thanked me and said, “And you speak English!” And Harris’ research shows that ESL writers are appreciative when their coaches are sympathetic to the difficulties of learning the language, which Jen’s smile confirms.

Case 2: Stacey

Stacey was a senior English Education student who had four consecutive sessions with me. She typically brought in journals about or lesson plans for her student-teaching. She initially came in because her supervisor was very critical of her writing, especially her grammar, punctuation, and wordiness, and instructed her to seek tutoring. She was very self-motivated – she told me about the practices she was doing at home and the resources she was using enhance her writing. Her directness in the sessions also indicated her initiative.

Case 3: Stacey

The following losses happened during my first session with Stacey and they are surprising in terms of my topic because I was very passive in the resolution to the loss. As I already mentioned, Stacey was driven and certainly so from the very beginning. She sat down, pulled her papers out, and said her supervisor wanted her to work on grammar and writing. My first loss was very quick, and it was a loss of how to start the session. I wondered momentarily exactly what we should work on, for she had given me some pretty broad subject areas. Right after explaining why her supervisor sent her, she took the lead, pointing to a few specific paragraphs that she wanted to work on. This was a completely internal loss on my part because neither of us every physically for verbally acknowledged it, and she resolved it without ever knowing something needed resolving, with which I was perfectly content. (blech I know that sentence is bad, but this is a draft. so there.)

2009-11-30T17:47:00.001-05:00

draft: lit review, methods, data analysis (blog 19)

2009-11-29T17:25:00.000-05:00

Parts I'm still missing:

One more lit review

2 or 3 more case study samples

I'm still trying to decide which sessions would be best.

And, um, if you can't tell... this is already really long. I'm at 7 pages. Seven. And this probably isn't even half of the whole thing. I'm an undergrad, so my requirement is 8 pages. I think my last 2 lit reviews are too long... Maybe after looking at everybody else's I'll see how I can trim mine down.

Also, I'm wondering a little how much extra commentary goes in the data analysis section. In my notes from that class, I see that I can include some supporting discussion and small observations. I'm just eager to see what ya'll have done so I can know if I'm on the right track with that.

Literature Review

Brooke Ann Smith’s The Socratic method: The answer for the new tutor was the first writing center discourse I ever read. Smith, at the time of publication, was an English instructor and writing center tutor at Utah State University. Her article describes one of her first sessions in which a girl brings in a fairly good paper, and Smith is at a loss as to what to say – after she read the paper aloud, the writer “looked… expectantly” at Smith, hoping she would “reveal the problems with her paper and correct them” (9). She wanted to “move beyond the role of proofreader to that of facilitator, helping students… become fundamentally better writers,” but the writer clearly walked in with different expectations.

At this point, Smith began to panic a little because of the high quality of the paper, and she reflects on her internal battle with perception, “Not only was my reputation as a tutor on the line… but my own self image as an ‘English person’” (15). She settles on asking a leading question about what the writer’s thesis is and how she supports it. The writer discusses these points, then says of one paragraph, “…it is kind of a tangent, now that you point it out,” though Smith said nothing at all about that (15). For the rest of the session, Smith asked broad questions “prompting the observant writer to find opportunities for improvement on her own,” which the writer did (15). So Smith concludes that “often a student knows what can be changed in her paper to make it stronger” (15).

When Elizabeth Boquet wrote Intellectual Tug-of-War: Snapshots of Life in the Center, she was a graduate student in a rhetoric and linguistics program, and she describes working in the writing center as her first “real” job. In her essay, she uses personal “snapshots” to examine “moments when tutors are simply at a loss,” and to look at “those moments when tutors feel their own progress toward becoming the ‘ideal’ writing center tutor is jeopardized.

In her first mini snapshot, she describes a tiring day where one student ends up storming out of the center because she could not find her file on the computer, and then when an ESL writer comes in to get his grammar checked, Boquet fights the urge to be cynical. In just this small picture, Boquet describes a situation where there is no recovery to the loss when the writer’s paper disappeared, and she touches on the internal conflict tutors often deal with in terms of perception, wondering if she seems like a bad tutor.

Boquet begins the bulk of her article by discussing the position of the tutor. First of all, she claims, “Tutors are often objectified and essentialized in literature devoted to them” because most publications are about and for peer tutors, but rarely by peer tutors (118). She also points out that “a peer is not a professional; a tutor is not a teacher,” so tutors have a confusing position of authority which affects writing sessions (118). Boquet mentions Brooks’ article on minimalist tutoring and calls it “downright militant,” and while she “wouldn’t wrestle authority away from the writers themselves, [she] also [knows] that simply reflecting student concerns back to the student does not always foster the most productive tutorial environment” (118-19). She also mentions she does not want to be perceived as having all the right answers (even if she does) because in an ideal session, she “would facilitate a student’s self-discover, [but she] also [knows] that real tutorial cases are not always as simple as that” (119). This less than ideal situation can put a tutor at a loss where she battles the internal conflict of perception versus reality.

In one session Boquet writes about, she had to negotiate between her goals and responsibilities as a tutor, the needs of a student, and that student’s professor’s agenda. The tutee, Michael, brought in a work sheet packet with cryptic symbols and the professor’s assignment to write two sentences a night prescribed by a code that would ultimately yield a paper. Michael asked for help deciphering the symbols, and Boquet “was astounded, speechless” (120). Michael asked if all English classes were as troubling as his. Boquet disagreed, to say the least, with the professor’s methods, and she writes, “I was caught between my knowledge as a professional, my responsibilities to students, and my precarious position as a graduate assistant in an ancillary university service” (121). After some internal debating about all three arguments, Boquet decided to follow her center’s faculty-tutor-student protocol by keeping quiet and helping the student the best she could given the confining but required task.

At the time, Boquet justified to herself that the “ideal” tutor is neutral and should help writers “operate within the constraints of his rhetorical context,” but later she was not so convinced by her justification (121). She felt like she sided with the faculty because she did not “speak to the situation in any meaningful way,” yet she did not want to get involved in the politics of challenging a faculty member (121). And ultimately she admits, “I don’t know how I would have done it differently…, [but] I never felt more acutely that I had fallen short of my own ‘ideal’” (121). So while she did resolve her loss of how to respond to the student, she herself remains at a point of conflict.

Though her article Cultural Conflicts in the Writing Center: Expectations and Assumptions of ESL Students does no deal specifically with a tutor’s loss, Muriel Harris does point out key areas where tutors and writers have differing expectations of the session which can, certainly in my experience, cause a loss. First of all, she notes that tutors are trained to expect or create a “collaborative, interactive, individualized setting” and to avoid taking control of the session in lieu of leading writers to internalize and adopt ways to become better writers (209).

To see what ESL writers expect from a session, Harris gave eighty-five international students a lengthy questionnaire. In contrast to what tutors are trained to do, one ESL writers wrote, “Tutor works with you to fix your mistakes or solve your problems” (209). Most other writers had the same perception that tutors work on specific errors rather than abstract writing skills and processes and tutors “deliver information” while controlling the session, “finding problems and offering solutions” (210). Writers, in turn, say their role is to listen, so typical tutor questions like “How would you fix this paragraph” may be met with silence even if the writer has an answer; Harris explains, “For ESL students, finding their own answers rather than being told what the answer is or what they must learn can be a new process” (211).

Harris briefly describes what happens in a writing session where both parties have these diverging preconceptions as a “cross-cultural…clash… [because] the two parties are acting out assumptions and expectations from very different worlds” (212). This clash is where I see the loss, though the tutor may not recognize it.

Harris also discusses some ways a coach can deal with the discomfort created in the loss, which are possible ways to approach a recovery. She mentions how some coaches can relate to being in a foreign country with limited linguistic knowledge, and she says, “It is our responsibility to be sensitive to their discomfort and to help them restore their sense of self-worth as they go through this process” (214). In the questionnaire, the students themselves most often said they most appreciated American friendliness. On the other hand, they impatience when they do not know answers annoys ESL writers. And again, a coach’s lack of awareness of cultural differences may lead to other habits that annoy the writers. In the advice to tutors section of the questionnaire, one writer wrote, “Try to understand how hard they have to work to study in the foreign country and language” (217). The writers also said that if they respect writers, tutors will “be patient, polite, and helpful… [and] will make an effort to understand the student” (218).

Methods

In my these notes, I wrote down nonverbal cues signaling emotions or thoughts, and I tried to be as specific as I could about the situation and what was said during the loss.

Data Analysis

Jen is an ESL writer who has been studying English for three semesters. Her native language is Spanish. In our session, she was not hesitant to talk, but she spoke quietly and with a heavy accent. She brought in a graded midterm paper that was a response to a reading about obesity. She wanted to correct the errors her professor marked, which were mainly sentence-level errors with some coherency problems from sentence to sentence as well as from paragraph to paragraph.

I read the first paragraph of her paper and was immediately confused about what she was trying to convey. I could tell she was thinking about how different sexes perceive obesity, but I could not understand any main idea beyond that. So pointing to the page, I said, “I don’t understand what you mean here. Can you explain it?” Then she reread to me some of the phrases in the same paragraph without using any different words. Back and forth we had an exchange where I would repeat back to her in my words what I understood her to be saying, and she would sigh, say, “No,” and re-explain herself, pointing to and repeating words from that paragraph. Her sighs and firm pointing told me she was getting tired, and I was sending signals that I was also tired because my voice became more monotone.

Finally she says, “Yes” to what I say about her point, but then I find myself at a second loss; I did not know how to begin helping her revise this paragraph. I already concluded that open-ended questions would not work out well with her, so I sat holding her paper, squinting, saying, “Hmm” and “Umm,” and pausing before I finally decided to be directive. I said, “Okay. Well, this should be…,” and I proceeded to specifically walk her through the paper, telling her what to change.

After we revised the first paragraph, I sat back in my chair, took a big breath, and told her, “You’re doing a good job. I know this is really confusing and sometimes I don’t even know the answers and you’re doing a good job.” She smiled and laughed and thanked me. I also told her, “I respect you a lot for learning another language because I’ve learned a little bit of other languages – even Spanish.” She replied, “Oh, like, Hola?” I laughed and said, “Oh, no! I know a little more, um, like, [pause] Donde esta la puerta por la biblioteca?” Later when we would come to a problem that I did not know how to answer, I would say, “Wow. Okay this is tough. I’m not sure.” Then she laughed and said, “And you speak English!”

And it finally sinks in...

2009-11-28T18:27:00.001-05:00

I just came across this article called Cultural Conflicts in the Writing Center: Expectations and Assumptions of ESL Students by Muriel Harris, and it is blowing my mind. I know we've discussed this some, and we may have even read it, but it's just now really sinking in with me that ESL writers may not respond to open-ended and leading questions for cultural reasons! A lot of times, I get frustrated, and wonder if the writer just doesn't... think on a higher level. But no, Laura. Oh no, no, no. First of all, their perceptions of what a tutor does are flat out the opposite of what we're taught to do, and it's contra-cultural for them to be informal like we expect. (Okay, yes, these are sweeping generalizations... but Harris gave a mass amount of ESL students a lengthy questionnaire, and these are the generalizations she's making from that.)
So, really, the problem has just been opposing perceptions of what the session should be like! Aha! And this is sort of the afterthought resolution to some of my losses... though it's not doing those writers any good. But now I think I'll have more understanding in the future.

-------------
And now the article right after that is calling my name, but I'll have to save it for later because I don't think I really need it for my project (and if I read everything that looked interesting when doing research.. well.. I may have completed very few projects). But anyway, Sharon A. Myers' Reassessing The "Proofreading Trap": ESL Tutoring and Writing Instruction, and its abstract (or summary.. or something) says that helping students correct "sentence-level" errors (as opposed to focusing on those HOCs) is good and should be done because it's a huge part of learning the language. And I always felt kinda.. guilty for just working on these kinds of errors.

research plan 2 (blog 18)

2009-11-23T15:23:00.000-05:00

Statement of purpose: I hope to show mostly first-hand examples of a tutor being at a loss of what to do in a writing session.

Detailed statement of research question: What happens before, during and after the tutor's loss? What are the signs she is at a loss, how does she handle it, and what are the writer's reactions?

Information to gather: Other published examples/analysis of losses, observations of verbal and nonverbal cues of tutor and writer surrounding the loss, and, when possible, reactions/thoughts of tutor after session.

Preliminary list of sources:
The Socratic Method: The Answer for the New Tutor by Brooke Ann Smith
"Whispers of Coming and Going": Lessons from Fannie by Anne Dipardo
Intellectual Tug-of-War: Snapshots of Life in the Center by Elizabeth H. Boquet
* I still need to find more sources relating to my observations

Plan for gathering information: I will search through various writing center publications (books and journals), consult communication publications for interpretations of nonverbal cues, take notes on sessions I conduct, and take notes on sessions I observe.

draft o'research plan (blog 17)

2009-11-16T10:50:00.000-05:00

Statement of purpose: I hope to show first- and second-hand examples of a tutor being at a loss of what to do in a writing session.

Detailed statement of research question: What happens before, during and after the tutor's loss? What are the signs she is at a loss, how does she handle it, and what are the writer's reactions?

Information to gather: Other published examples/analysis of losses, observations of verbal and nonverbal cues of tutor and writer surrounding the loss, and, when possible, reactions/thoughts of tutor after session.

Preliminary list of sources:
The Socratic Method: The Answer for the New Tutor by Brooke Ann Smith
"Whispers of Coming and Going": Lessons from Fannie by Anne Dipardo
Intellectual Tug-of-War: Snapshots of Life in the Center by Elizabeth H. Boquet

Plan for gathering information: I will search through various writing center publications (books and journals), consult communication publications for interpretations of nonverbal cues, take notes on sessions I conduct, and take notes on sessions I observe.

And you speak English! (blog 16)

2009-11-11T08:22:00.000-05:00

For data collecting, specifics are key - they are the only true evidence because a summary much more interpretive, which isn't fact. And research demands fact.

Notes from today when I was at a loss...

(This session is with an ESL student with somewhat low proficiency, and we are looking at a paper she wrote on obesity. I get hung up with a paragraph that has several long, run-on, discombobulated sentences - I'm having a hard time figuring out which subject goes with which verb.)
Me: I don't understand what you mean here (pointing on page)

Writer: -explains, reading many of the same phrases from the paragraph that I don't understand-

We go back and forth... I'm repeating what I think she is saying, several times she says, "No.. [explains again]." We shift between looking at each other and looking at/pointing to things on paper. Finally I say what I think she is trying to say, and she agrees that I understand her correctly.

Me: (looks back at paper, picks paper up, squints... trying to think of how to now help her write this idea more clearly). Ummm. (I'm trying to think how to help her see the problems, but it's so hard for me to identify what's going on that I don't know how to talk her through it.) -pauses- Hmm. -pauses- Okay. Well, this should be... (took directive approach, pretty specifically telling her what to do)

------------
I'm still not sure if this is specific enough - I can't remember exactly what we said as far as the content of the paper. I think it's hard to remember because we really weren't communicating well.
When I was "umm"ing and stuff, I was thinking, "I have no idea what to do. I can't just tell her she's on her own, but I really can't figure this out." So I kind of came to the decision that I had to do something... I had to just plow through it and make some improvements, even if it wasn't going to be perfect. That's when I became directive, justifying that's what she needed because of the situation.
I felt like I had been kind of negative during all that, so I tried to follow it up with some encouragement...

Me: Okay, you're doing a good job. I know this is really confusing, and even I don't know the right answers sometimes. How long have you been studying English?
Writer: 3 semesters.
Me: Okay wow. Yeah, you're doing a great job. I really respect anyone who tries to learn English.. or any other language really. I speak a little of some other languages, and I know it's tough. But yeah, I definitely respect you for this.
Writer: (laughs) Thank you.

--------------
Throughout the rest of the session I tried to keep up with the reinforcements -"Yeah, that's right!" "Exactly." "Oh, okay, that's a much better example than mine!" I even said, "English is tricky. I've been speaking it my whole life, and I still have problems, so don't worry too much." And when I would say, "Oh man. I'm not really sure...," she would laugh a little and say, "And you speak English!"
I wanted to let myself be a little more vulnerable than maybe I usually am because the opening was so rough -- I wanted to help her understand that it's hard to be perfect with English, and she shouldn't feel bad because even native speakers get it wrong.

discussion, reflections, notes.. (blog 15)

2009-11-06T13:34:00.001-05:00

The class discussion was pretty interesting and helpful. It helped me begin thinking about the different classes of losses, which I had not thought of before. Two kinds were agenda-related:
- For the Dr. Chandler + Daria session, I wrote down "needs of situation vs. expectation." I'm trying to remember what I meant by that... Daria didn't have her paper/couldn't revise it (Dr. Chandler's expectations weren't fulfilled), but Dr. Chandler still needed to have a tutoring session (needs of situation)... Okay.

- Then, in reference to a session I had with an ESL student, I wrote down "what I feel student wants vs. what I feel I 'should' do as a tutor." I was having this internal conflict because the writer's paper was about three pages and was completely marked over in red, and the writer wanted to fix it all. I knew that looking at just one kind of issue at a time is how I'm *supposed* to do it, but I also was getting the sense that the writer really wanted everything to be fixed, and I didn't think there was time to go through the essay multiple times. (Plus, she already rewrote -or maybe recopied- the essay, so most of the mistakes were taken care of... and I think she did understand them... there's just a lot to remember when you're writing in another language.) So I ended up going through the paper with her, looking at errors as we found them.

- And I think I wrote this third class down when we were discussing someone else's session... "how I want to be perceived vs. what I actually know." I think that characterizes what it's like when there's a problem (or question or whatever) that the tutor doesn't know the answer to, but doesn't want the writer to lose confidence in her because isn't the tutor supposed to know all this stuff?!

So maybe the next step in my notetaking is to start classifying the losses. That could really help organize everything.

Some other things from the class discussion~
The common thread in all losses is conflict, and I think it might most frequently be internal conflict in the tutor (and I have internal conflict all the time, so I guess this topic is quite fitting!). Also, as Dr. Chandler put it, it's a "point of inaction." And perhaps an element of the conflict is struggling to find action.

Time to do some more researching...

purpose and question and then messy thoughts (blog 14)

2009-11-03T20:11:00.000-05:00

Purpose: to explore what happens, on both the student and tutor sides, when the tutor is at a loss and to compare my observations with what other research says.

Research Question: During a loss, what happens before, during, and after it; how do the writer and coach react; and how does all this compare with research?

What I will observe in sessions... I need to almost predict with a loss will happen since I'm aiming to note the "rising action," if you will. I originally thought that would be fairly easy.. you know, I would be able to see the session's path was heading down one the tutor slowly feels uneasy about. But from my experiences so far, I kind of just... hit this sudden wall of "oh man... what do I do now?!" So at least for most of my sessions, that rising action may be very minimal - it may solely consist of one sentence the student utters. But if that's what happens, then that's what happens!
Okay so I also need to pay attention to body language because that may be my biggest indicator as to what both parties are feeling (unless I'm one of the parties cause then, well, I generally know how I'm feeling).
And then I guess I also need to try to determine what the tutor decides to do.. kind of interpret his actions and match them up with the closest method or action that the research talks about.. or doesn't talk about because, hey, we've got a unique bunch of tutors who may do something wild and crazy! or the tutor may do something not wild and crazy but still something research doesn't mention.
what else what else what else... there's the evaluation forms that can give me student feedback... still thinkin about that one. umm.
okay maybe the type of writing or assignment or problem will be significant. because looking back on my sessions so far.. I think I've started out in each one of them not knowing exactly how to approach it. I wonder if I do that every time and that's just my method of getting started.
well let me think back to last year when I was tutoring... I guess a lot of times I start off running through a lot of options in my head.. but sometimes I think I pretty much know where to go. I may end up deciding that that initial period of figuring out what to do is a different kind of loss.. and I may not.

readings (blog 13)

2009-11-03T19:43:00.003-05:00

Tentative Thesis:

What happens when the tutor is at a loss (of what to do)?

What I've been reading:

I have an article called "The Socratic method: The answer for the new tutor" by Brooke Ann Smith. I don't, however, know where this article was published - the director at a WC in South Carolina used this article in our tutor training. Smith retells a situation in which she didn't know what to do with a session because the writer's paper was "technically" correct, though the writer clearly wanted some instruction on how to improve it. So Smith questioned her, and the writer pretty much came up with what to do all on her own.

This is kind of a... very pretty picture of a session. This essay can be used to compare what I see happen in a similar situation (where a tutor's response to a loss is to ask questions).

And this is all assuming I can figure out where this article was published, of course.

A second article I'm considering is "Intellectual Tug-of-War: Snapshots of Life in the Center" by Elizabeth H. Boquet. Boquets article is, in my opinion, more realistic than a lot of other articles. Here, she write about WC situations that aren't ideal; when tutors do something "wrong," and when they don't know what to do. Two parts of her essay are unrelated to my topic (they're about tutor-tutor relationships), so I won't use those. She addresses a tutor's internal struggle - doing what fits the moment/doing what is right. She also presents situations where tutors have to deal with differing opinions - those of herself, the professor, and the writer. She uses her own real life examples of these losses, which I can again use to compare with mine.

The Great and Terrible Lozz (blog 13)

2009-10-27T16:40:00.000-04:00

In thinking about what kinds of things I would need to look at, I used my "When the Tutor Doesn't Know" thought. I think breaking it down into a timeline is a logical way to go about it.
(Note: for lack of not thinking of anything better yet, I'm referring to the act of not knowing what to do as "the loss" - as in "I'm at a loss for words.")

Signals preceding loss
Is it a sudden loss or has it been progressing?
-Were those sings nonverbal or verbal?
- What were they?

During loss
What is tutor doing nonverbally? (i.e., eyes looking off, backing away...etc.)
Is tutor saying anything?
Does she do something? (i.e., look up an answer, ask colleague)

What is student doing nonverbally/verbally?
Does he recognize the tutor is at a lass?
- If so, is he comfortable or uncomfortable? (What are those signs?)
- If he doesn't notice, why not? (Did the tutor disguise; how?)

Recovery
Is there indeed a recovery?
- How? What was done? Who did it?

Resolution
Do they discuss the tutor's loss?
How does tutor act?
- Is she bothered or not?
How does student react?
- Is he confused or not?

So I think this could actually turn into a sort of checklist. Woop woop. Some tricky aspects of it, though, are that it's pretty detailed, so it might be a little challenging to remember everything until the session is over. And on the flip side, it might actually be hard to recognize in another tutor when I'm observing - in my session today, I had a mini-loss at the beginning, but the student actually recovered for me, and if I had been observing, I don't know that I would have even noticed it. Annnd then again, if I'm hyper-sensitive to it, I might notice it a lot more than I ever have.

brainstorming part deux (blog 12)

2009-10-25T16:24:00.001-04:00

1. Back to the when-I-don't-know-what-to-do-as-a-tutor idea... I tried to notice on Wednesday night what happened when Dr. Chandler seemed to be trying to figure out what to say, etc. That made me realize that those situations are probably really common in a session. Nobody knows exactly what to say right off the bat every time.
Some of the signals were non-verbal - eyes looking off or up. And there were verbal cues as well - talking slowly or repeating Sam's question while Dr. Chandler thought of what to say.
So I think there's definitely somewhere to go with that... though I don't know exactly where it would go. I might need to narrow it down even more and focus on just nonverbal or just verbal stuff. And then there's got to be some.. analysis of it. Like what's good or what you should do or even how it's perceived.
I keep thinking of wanting to have like a debriefing with the student about how he perceived certain aspects of the session or tutor.

2. Last Monday I thought about what the most important elements of a session are. I would venture to say that the very beginning and end are most important. In the beginning, the tutor has to understand what the student needs/wants/says/doesn't say and get on board pretty quickly. Then, in the end it's pretty important to make sure the writer knows where to go. But then again... if the middle is bad, nothing else matters, right?
And there are elements beside just beginning, middle, and end. The necessary things to do will vary from session to session, but maybe my question is more like, "If I had to make a list of things to accomplish that would work with (almost?) every session, what would those things be?" This might be too broad.
And how would I research it? Perhaps I could compare what was done in each session and see what the common threads are and if those things are essential. And also try to consider what I'm not doing that is essential. Hmm.

3. "What makes writers come back to the center?" I think we read something about grades being a big factor, but we also noted that grades are hard to change in one session. Let's face it; a student could spend an hour with a tutor and still have a not so great paper. It may take some real dedication for some students to keep coming back, and how do we encourage them to do that when we can't do much about their grades? Is it connecting well with a tutor? Is it being strongly encouraged to come back? - Maybe being really specific and saying, "Hey, next time we can work on __________." Or is that too overwhelming? Okay so go home and work on this, and this, and this, and then you're still going to have a lot left to do. See you soon! (For the rest of your college career! Mwahaha...) (It's like at the dentist when you get the lecture about flossing, and then they schedule your next appointment right then and there.)
This is another one of those things where I would like to have some kind of post-session questionnaire for the writer where they can rate how helpful the session was and if they're likely to come back. I don't know if we can do that though.

prepare for battle! okay not battle. that's completely the wrong idea... (blog 10)

2009-10-20T20:54:00.000-04:00

Going into this, I'm feeling alright since I've had some experience before. I am a little nervous, though, because it's been a while since I've done any... -formal- tutoring (I've helped some friends since then, but that feels quite different). And even when I worked in a WC, I think that environment was pretty different than what this will be tomorrow.

Okay... strengths. I think I'm pretty comfortable talking with the writer about writing stuff. I also think I have fairly decent exposure to different kinds of assignments.

I need to keep looking through the different strategies so I can have them really fresh and hopefully I can do whatever the writer would benefit the most from. I think I will need to remember not to go too fast - it's better that the writer has a good grasp of what's going on than for him to be exposed to a whirlwind of ideas that he only sort of gets. I also need to be careful with any "writing lingo" I use and not throw it out without the writer knowing its meaning or explaining it in a way that's demeaning.

If I'm notetaking... being still will be a challenge. I shift around in my seat a lot. Gotta get settled and comfortable quick, Laura!

And if I'm coaching I need to turn on my multi-tasking hard drive so I can stay focused in the session while trying to remember important things to write down later. Ah!

Alright. I got this. I'm excited. =)

research brainstorming (blog 9)

2009-10-18T20:18:00.000-04:00

For my project, I really want to do something that will help me become a better coach. So that leads me to think about aspects I'm not comfortable with/skilled at.
One of those things is what to do when I don't know what to do. I could break that into when I don't know the answer to a student's question, when I don't know how to help a student or what style/method/technique to use, and when I don't know how to figure out what the student means. I think all of those together are pretty broad and I would need to focus on maybe just one or two. And relevant to all of them is how I do present myself when I'm at a loss and how I should present myself. I think taking notes on how I handle these situations as well as how another tutor handles it would be beneficial (along with reading what the experts have to say).

Another idea I have is about what to do when I disagree with a student. I think it sort of connects with the above stuff, but it's also different enough to stand alone. By disagreeing with a student... I guess I mean about either the topic she chooses or how she chooses to present her ideas. For instance, say a writer wanted to write about Kean being the worst school ever. (Okay, yes, this is an unlikely paper topic, but I've heard people say this...) I would have a hard time being objective. I might even argue with the student and give examples of how Kean is definitely not "the worst school ever." Now, I could say I was doing this to help improve her argument, modeling the process of developing an argument. Buuuuuut there's also a good chance I'm thinking, Uhhggg she has no idea what she's talking about. If she had ever gone to another school, she would see that parking is almost always bad, lots of schools have gone 'paperless,' and.... < That is not good coaching.
But if someone has a really bad topic (okay, or at least what I think is a really bad topic) that she is 100% sold on, what do you do?
And also like I mentioned, what if she has a pretty good topic, but insists that she wants to present it in X way, and I just think she's delivering it in a really bad way?
Maybe these are things that as a tutor, you sometimes just have to concede to? So maybe they're not even good research questions...

I do feel a little more confident about the first set being research-able, though.

checklist 1 (blog 8)

2009-10-12T16:07:00.002-04:00

I think once I figure out what I want to research, I'll modify my checklist. But for now, this checklist evaluates me as a tutor, as well as including general info about the session.

Who set the goals for the session?

Did I decide what approach I would take?

Did that approach work?

If it did not, what did I do?

Who asked the most questions?

How was most of the session spent?

How did the student respond to session?

What did I do when I didn't know what to do?

What happened during silences?

Did the student explain what he/she was going to do at the end of the session?

notetaking; take 1 (blog 7)

2009-10-06T11:07:00.002-04:00

When I took sociolinguistics (it was called Language Variation in Society at the time, but I think they're changing the name.. either way it's ENG 4120), we filled the whole board with a detailed list of all the things that go on during a speech event, and it's really too much to get all of them. I noticed that I was looking so closely at how the participants were talking and moving that I really didn't know what they were talking about. I did write down specific things they said, but it was stuff like, "Do you have any ideas?" "Let's look at the organization." "So what I hear you saying is..." (can you tell I mostly did tutor quotes?) I knew what was going on; the writer was unsure about what the essay was about. But I wasn't so in tune that I would have been able to answer a detailed question about the session. Does that makes sense?

I think it is more important to make note of the hows instead of the whats. Because no two sessions will have the same content, so it will be hard to make generalizations and comparisons. But how the session is handled - what the tutor does and how the writer responds can be looked at on a larger scale.

But that still leaves a lot of options for what to write down! In the sessions I observed in class, I was writing down what stuck out to me most... But I don't know if that will yield consistent notes throughout the sessions I watch. So this is still a conundrum to me.

ma philosophie: the sequel (blog 6)

2009-10-03T21:35:00.000-04:00

I'm going to try to take some of Tim's advice and not over think this.

The writing center is a place for writers of all degree at any point in the writing process. They come because they want to become better writers, they are struggling with a specific piece, or they are advised to come. The center's overall purpose is to help people become better writers - get better with the writing process. And process is how we try to address problems. That said, when a writer comes in with a particular problem with a particular piece, we don't gloss over that and just preach in glittering generalities about The Process. We start where the writer's at, and aim to help him walk out of the center feeling confident about what he's working on and will work on in the future.

I feel pretty solid about that. *victory arms*

I'm still hanging on to my mix of romanticism and collaboration - a lot of knowledge is already in the writer. At this point, we've been in school for at least 13 years, and I know that plenty has been taken in through all that. Not to mention all that plain old life teaches about how to think things through and then communicate them. But I'm also becoming increasingly aware of how helpful, and dare I say needed, collaboration is.

So coaches and writers work as a team. The coach lets the writer think/write/talk through as much as she is willing to. This means that the coach has to be very attentive to the situation. The coach will probe and ask questions when he thinks the writer has more to add but hasn't quite articulated.

The coach should also be more than willing to give his input. They will ideally be comfortable enough to collaborate - this means neither coach nor writer is superior.

Above all, the coach must be flexible! He should be familiar with exercises for an array of issues likely to come up in a session. And he should be able to adjust if said exercise doesn't work out like it "should." And if he just doesn't no what to do, there's certainly no shame in collaborating with someone else.

Political realities.... Hm. Ideally the administration as well as faculty would support the writing center - its presence and its mission. But the reality? I guess we can't make anyone like us (but we sure hope our efforts will have that effect!), and I still only think it's right to never outright disagree with a teacher. Sure, they give some awful assignments, but out in "the real world," bosses are going to do the same thing. So as a Writing Center focused on developing writers better equipped for writing anything, we help the writer make the best of the situation, sending her back to the teacher if necessary/possible.

To possibly help curb some of these issues, we would let teachers know we are absolutely more than willing to collaborate about assignments. Or at least give them some pointers. Also we would let them know that we can be more helpful to their students if we get feedback from teachers about what kinds of things they're looking for in an assignment. We welcome open communication, but don't demand it. And at the end of the day, we help writers as best we can without stepping on teachers' toes.

Okay.. not so wordy this time! Maybe...

2nd session, still just talk (blog 5)

2009-09-29T09:13:00.005-04:00

When I coached Tim, the main thing we dealt with was his focus - he had introduced two ideas in the first paragraph, so we looked at that to narrow it down. We also worked a bit on his organization which mostly fell into place after deciding on his real focus. And then he had some questions about his response - what to do and how to go about it. We decided that answering "Why?" or "How?" to things from his summary was going to work well for him.

In both my sessions I have basically just conversed about the essay. Now, I have had good, prepared 'students' each time who knew exactly where/what their problems were, so I didn't feel a need to whip one of the exercises out. But I still wonder if I should be using a method from the book. I definitely want practice doing that. I think maybe I need to read over them a few more times so I can remember them better and remember when to use them.

no draft tutoring (blog 4)

2009-09-26T15:32:00.003-04:00

When I was the student

Musheera asked questions about what I planned/wanted to do with the assignment. I asked questions about how to go about it.. "Should I put this here or here?" "Which way does this work better." So I think the questions and talking were about equal. She had me do a little bit of writing, so there was also time when no one was talking. After we talked about what I generally wanted to write about, I did the 3 x 5 card exercise, but after I was done, she realized that didn't work out quite how she thought it would. She was really flexible, though, and made it work. We didn't really do what the book suggests, but it still turned out to be helpful. - It showed me what I had more to write about, and then gave me a very rough outline.

When I was the tutor

We pretty much went the conversation route. She already had some good ideas she wanted to write about, and if I interpreted right, she was wanting to see if what she was thinking would make sense/work out for the assignment. I think she may have been unsure if the assignment called for what she wanted to write, and I was pretty certain it did. I feel like I may have done too much talking, but she seemed to get some new ideas just after I repeated back what I heard her say. That's sort of collaboration, right?

I left flexibility out of my philosophy, and it needs to be included. A lot of times a method you try will either not fit the assignment or not fit the student like you originally thought, but it's important to work with it the best you can.

ma philosophie (blog 3)

2009-09-22T14:34:00.005-04:00

Initially, I'm leaning toward a kind of Garret center because while I see value in collaboration, I don't yet know how that works in a writing center. The center is primarily set up for the students coming in (the tutees or "coachees"), and I can see them benefitting the most from a Garret approach. I don't think the students should be set up all alone to search for answers deep within, but I do think most people know much more than they think they do about writing, and they quite often just need some coaching or probing. Sometimes they need a lot of that. I can, though, venture out of strict, Romantic, individualism over into more of a collaborative way of thinking to admit that I can't learn all I need to know about writing on my own - I need to talk with someone about what I'm doing or what I can't do.

I want to see collaboration in action because I think I could appreciate it a lot more. I don't know that I could abandon all the of ideas of a Garret center because it's important to trust my own abilities and knowledge sometimes. Or at least trust that I know how to figure something out.

The knowledge in the center is in both the student and the tutor (here I am, back to collaboration, right?). The writer always know what he wants to say.. okay he may not always know that, but the tutor certainly can't tell him what he thinks. But.. as far as what is right.. there are some instances when it's hard to avoid the Storehouse concept where the tutor is right. I like the idea of having the student look up answers he doesn't know and then talk through it with the tutor, but even that can put the tutor into an authoritative position. The student should be encouraged to look up information about his question, but things get messy sometimes and it just works better for the tutor to explain it. So, knowledge is in both, but because the tutor probably has more experience, the tutor can clarify something difficult.

As I mentioned above, knowledge comes from the student searching for it the best he can, then talking about it with the tutor, and sometimes hearing it back from the tutor in another way.

Knowledge itself is almost always subjective. Many lower order concerns have definite right answers, but there are still some of those that could be a little grey. I think knowledge is in conversation. A student can read about writing an introduction, but talking about how that applies to the intro he was written or will write makes that knowledge useful. And what's the point of knowledge without knowing how to use it? Conversation can make the knowledge real and useful and applicable.

Phew. This is hairy and complicated and a big thing to wrap my head around.

I think I'll have some modifying to do throughout the semester on the role of the tutor. In my previous experience, the students were to spend an hour in the center every week. If they came in with nothing to do, the tutors had to figure out something, putting us in kind of an authoritative situation. Some of the students certainly had things to work on, but were very obstinate (to put it lightly), so we were even more authoritative then.

Ideally, though, I think the session should be led by the student, with the tutor there as a sounding board or question-asker. If the student clearly expects the tutor to be the sole authority, it's important for the tutor to put the ball back in the student's court, helping the student take ownership.

As far as the physical setup, I like the sessions being held at tables roomy enough for the student and tutor to sit comfortably and spread out books and papers. I think sitting across from each other feels most natural (that's how we sit with a friend at meals or study groups), but if you're really looking at writing, it can get difficult. I feel like side-by-side can be awkward and intimidating, especially if you don't know each other. So I'm a fan of being at a round table or on a corner.

The center should be comfortably lit - bright and warm, but not sterile. If the tutoring tables are small, the tutors should be able to go to another table if the student is going to write for a bit. The center should have computers with Internet access as well as reference books. If students frequently write on their own, perhaps a corner with minimal distractions should be set up.

The tutors and director should feel comfortable coming to each other about tutoring experiences. The director should be like a tutor's resource, not just a boss. The tutors should remain professional around the students. The tutors and students should be able to have a friendly, comfortable relationship, but they need to keep the focus on writing throughout the session. The center should well known at the school as a helpful, inviting place for writers at every level.

I'm not sure how I think the teachers and tutors should interact. I've worked in a center where a few of the tutors were teachers. I think I like that idea. It can make teachers seem more human and approachable to the students, and it's also helpful as a tutor to get a teacher's perspective. As far teachers on a whole and tutors... I don't how to handle that.

Back to the only experience I've had... we kept a file for each student through which her teacher and tutor could communicate - the teacher could leave a note to the tutor about an assignment, or the tutor could give feedback on the student's progress. We made notes about every session so that if a teacher came to the center because a student said, "My tutor told me I didn't need to edit this!" we had a record to clarify the misunderstanding. That worked well, but wouldn't seem as great in a larger or different program. I do think there should be the option for communication in some way, though. It's definitely important that tutors have a safety net for being blamed for a decision a student made. But that's not to say a tutor can never misguide a student. If that does happen, perhaps teachers should go through the director - make sure the center itself doesn't have a policy on X issue that the teacher didn't know about. And ideally the director has good interpersonal skills (as well as lots of tutoring experience) and can talk to the tutor without seeming confrontational.

Lunsford outline (blog 2)

2009-09-19T16:13:00.003-04:00

There are three kinds of writing centers - Storehouse, Garret, and Burkean Parlor

The Burkean Parlor sort is ideal, but should only be taken on with caution

Collaboration is ideal because

- it promotes broader thinking/learning

~ by stirring the collaborators to find problems (and work with them)

~ by engaging group participation - in multiple kinds of "active learning"

This all results in better and higher levels of learning

Caution is necessary because

- collaboration is difficult

~ in that it requires all collaborators engage equally

~ in that it goes against our experiences and social norms

~ in that it "can easily degenerate into busy work"

(personal observation... Maybe I should do outlines more. Breaking it down and then grouping it up has really helped me get what she's saying...)

to cheer or not to cheer? (blog 1)

2009-09-15T12:36:00.003-04:00

What would I like to learn more about? How not to do everything in chapter three. Especially how not to focus too much on editing. I think I might have a tendency to get hung up on that because I'm really comfortable talking about commas, parts of speech, and all that jazz. That stuff is concrete. For the most part, it's black and white - it's right or it's not, and I know how to tackle that. But show me an unorganized paper, and I might feel just as overwhelmed as the writer. And it can take a lot of effort to get my head around whatever it is the other person is talking (writing) about especially if he thinks it makes perfect sense.

On the cheerleading issue... I definitely agree that false praise is, well, annoying and unproductive. But I'm glad that the authors included praise about praise. Writing is such an intimidating thing, and an honest compliment can go a long way. On the other hand, now I'm thinking about what it's like to hang on every comment on a graded paper - how those can make or break me. That's not good either, even when it's positive feedback because I should feel proud of my hard work regardless of what anyone else has to say about it. hmm. So how do you help someone learn to feel good about her writing before anyone says anything (and without making her think she deserves that A because she wrote it)?

numero uno

2009-09-14T16:40:00.000-04:00

Hello world.