Re: The tutee's privacy

[Marcy Trianosky <mtrianosky@hollins.edu>]

Christine,

You mentioned being concerned about decreased candidness in reports if they
had to be edited for professors.  I addressed this problem by having tutors
do a journal entry on each session that is read only by me and the other
tutors.  I ask tutors to use these entries (which I call "tutor
responses")to reflect on their tutoring practices, and to "cut loose" and
say whatever they want about how they felt about a session, or how they
felt in general (are they sleep-deprived? overloaded? etc.). These tutor
responses become a valuable tool when taken into a staff meeting, where the
tutors can discuss shared concerns about students, the writing center, or
themselves.  It also makes it easier, I find, for tutors to write
objectively about a session in the professor report, because they can still
use the tutor responses to "vent" if necessary. And by reading the tutor
response and the professor form side by side, I get the full picture of
what happened in a session. By asking tutors to write two different kinds
of responses to a session, I hope to increase their awareness of audience
as they write, and of the different purposes the two kinds of reports
serve. We talk a lot about appropriate language for our professor reports,
and we discuss what kinds of word choices are needed to protect the student
and inform the professor.  I have had few occasions when professors
challenge what occurred in a session; if that happens, I pull out the tutor
response and the professor report, discuss the session with the tutor, and
respond to the faculty member in as informed a manner as possible.  Rather
than finding these situations problematic, I find that they give me a
chance to explain to the fauclty member what our tutoring philosophy is and
the many variables that need to be considered when evaluating a session's
effectiveness, including the nature of the assignment, student motivation,
time available between the tutoring session and the due date of the paper,
etc. Although I discuss these things with faculty in other contexts as part
of promoting our Writing Center, these "teachable moments" that relate
directly to a professor's class and assignments are often a more valuable
way of making our mission and practices clear. And they wouldn't occur
unless a professor report was sent. 

I'd like to think that we are protecting student privacy *and* keeping our
faculty informed of activity in our Writing Center, but it's certainly a
struggle to maintain that balance. It's very useful to hear the reasoned
arguments that you and others make for maintaining complete confidentiality
for your students; it helps me to stay alert to the potential problems of
sharing information on sessions with faculty.

Marcy



Marcy Trianosky
Director, the Writing Center
Hollins University
P. O. Box 9526
Roanoke, VA  24020

Phone:  (540) 362-6576
FAX:    (540) 362-6642
e-mail:  <mtrianosky@hollins.edu>