Re: "other" tutors

["Prof. Jean Timpel" <JTIMPEL@bach.cuw.edu>]

Lynell,
Other tutoring is academic tutoring; and training and supervising it 
is teaching on your part the same as writing center supervision.  I 
am 50% faculty and 50% Learning/writing Center Director.  I have 30 
to 45 tutors on my payroll including writing consultants and football 
study table tutors and Supplemental Instruction leaders.  Many of 
them tutor only a couple hours a week, but I need them because no one 
else can tutor Principles of Management or Organic Chemistry for 
Nurses or whatever.  

I don't even try to get them all together as I do the Writng 
Consultants.  I just schedule 3 or 4 different times early in the 
semester and hand them a memo with the times when they give me their 
schedules.  I use a video series from UCLA called the Tutor's Guide 
for part of the training time and focused discussions for the 
remainder of the 2 hours.  When I recruit tutors later to cover a 
specific need, I try to get 2 or 3 of them together for training so 
we can hold a discussion.  It does take a lot of time including some 
evenings, but I believe it is essential. 
I would be very uneasy sending students, even 4.0 students, out to 
help others if I was not sure they had solid tutoring principles to 
guide them.  If they realize that their job is to teach the student 
how to be a better physics student, not just have the right answers 
on the homework page, then I don't have to be watching all the time.  
I see my main responsibility as LC Director to be teaching them to 
tutor, not hovering.  Evaluations of my three separate tutoring 
programs have all included comments that the tutor "made me do the 
work" and "helped me understand what I didn't get in class."  I 
encourage tutors to come to me with concerns or problems and I try to 
talk to them often, asking how a session went or what is happening 
with a particular student.

I guess I do see content area tutors as "other" or separate from the 
Writing Center.  Everything I have said here is the "other" tutors.  
WC gets separate, more intensive training, and I don't accept new 
consultants along the way.  They have to start in August and get the 
full treatment.  

Jean
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Jean Timpel
Concordia University-Wisconsin
12800 N. Lake Shore Drive
Mequon. WI 53097
414-243-4216
jtimpel@bach.cuw.edu
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