Tutoring Tip (fwd)

[Nick Carbone <ncarbone@lamar.ColoState.EDU>]

We had a meeting, my co-directors and I, and decided that we'd be writing
tips of the week for tutors, and asking for them from tutors. These aren't
especially brilliant offerings, but since we're sending them in email to
our tutors, I'm thinking some of them might be worth sending to this list
as well for others to amend and use.

I got the idea from the call for scenarios.  I imagine we all have
occasion to offer our tutors advice, or tutors have times when they share
advice, and thought it would be cool to swap some here. So, for kicks,
thought I'd get it rolling by tossing this one into the hopper.



-- 
Nick Carbone, Writing Center Director
 
CSU Writing Center        http://www.colostate.edu/Depts/WritingCenter
6 Eddy Hall                          writingcenter@vines.colostate.edu
491-0222                 Personal e-mail: ncarbone@lamar.colostate.edu

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 1 Oct 1998 17:21:02 -0600 (MDT)
From: Nick Carbone <ncarbone@lamar.colostate.edu>
To: Writing Center Staff <wcenter@colostate.edu>
Subject: Tutoring Tip


I've heard some of you mention how busy the place can get, and I know what
you mean by it because I stepped into some of that this afternoon. At one
point we had all of us working with writers, two with RST's.  As I was
working with one writer, two others walked in.  

I took them both at once because I didn't want to have them waiting and
maybe leave. Here's how.  

I looked over their preview sheets quickly.  One person
needed help getting started, another needed help fine-tuning a vet school
application. I asked the vet school applicant to sit down with his piece
and to highlight areas that he felt needed work.  While he did that, I
talked to the getting started person about her project. In the meantime,
the person I had been with was asked to do a quick revision based on what
we had discussed. 

In other words, I gave each person a quick writing task, and then started
rotating among them to see how they'd done or how they were doing. This is
not much different, in practice, than having your class work in groups
where you move from group to group to see how they're doing.

The first person (the one I'd been working with when the other two 
arrived) had targeted a paragraph she wanted to revise to make it
stronger and less diffuse.  So she worked on that. 

In the discussion with the person who was getting started, we looked at
her paper--to write an analysis that defined a cause and showed three
effects that stemmed from the cause.  Her cause was getting along with a
roommate and the effects were the need to be courteous, learning how to
share, and learning how to get along. I was confused by this, not being
clear how learning how to get along was different from the cause, and not
sure how having a roommate was a cause per se. So she talked more about
what she had in mind, and what it turned out was that the roommate was a
given, but the cause turned out to be *the decision* to get along. In the
scenario she had in mind--stressed roommates at odds with one another--she
figured that really the decision to get along would *cause* behavior to
change, and what she was going to describe was what the effect would be on
behavior because of the decision.

So we finished that chat and I asked her to draft a paragraph that laid
all that out, and checked in with the first person who liked what she'd
come up with and who felt good about taking the piece home and fine-tuning
it.  So off it was to the vet school applicant who wanted very specific
help fine tuning his application essay.  I worked this by playing the role
of the application reviewer and stopped my reading whenever I had a
question about what he meant by something.  He noticed that right off the
bat he had two sentences back to back that said pretty much the same
thing, and that the first didn't have the emphasis where he wanted it. So
while he worked on those things, I checked on the getting started writer.  

She'd done a paragraph, but it still didn't layout what she'd described to
me, so I pointed that out, and did a summary/sayback of what she said, and
suggested, for scaffolding purposes, that she do another quick draft where
she tried to work in the terms 'cause' and 'effect,' to say explicitely in
other words what was the cause, and what were the effects. She tinkered
with that, and I moved back to the vet school guy.

I won't tell you how their stories ended, but you can see the strategy I
hope. The idea was to keep the writers writing and working on their
writing without keeping them waiting. 

It also forced me to get up and away from the writers, which gave them
some breathing space and time to try out what we'd talked about. That try
out gave both the writer and I a chance to see how an idea worked, and it
let us both adjust what our thinking in time for it to make more of a
difference to the writer.  In other words we moved a step beyond the
writing jotting notes on their paper and nodding yes to seeing how those
notes and nods played out in actually revising.

The tip is then, when there's more than one, set mini-writing tasks and
goals, and move around. When there's only one, you can use the same
strategy. Give the writer a task, and then give them space. In other
words, get out of the way of their learning.

-- 
Nick Carbone, Writing Center Director
 
CSU Writing Center        http://www.colostate.edu/Depts/WritingCenter
6 Eddy Hall                          writingcenter@vines.colostate.edu
491-0222                 Personal e-mail: ncarbone@lamar.colostate.edu