Re: High School Writing Centers -Reply

["Ann C. Pryor" <pryorac@ahsd.org>]

Dear Kevin,

Thank you for your response.  We have 11 periods in our day, and our center
is manned by an English teacher every period, with two teachers on duty for
period 11 which traditionally gets the most traffic.  We have a copy of each
English text, several dictionaries, a thesaurus, and several grammar books
on our shelves.  Generally students come to the clinic from their study
halls or from their lunches.  They usually have papers that have been
assigned by English teachers, occasionally a paper from a math teacher, and
often their college applications.

The clinic works fine unless 8 or 9 students turn up at once.  The teacher
attempts to read each paper and give face-to-face instruction while other
students share their papers with each other or use the books to aid them.
However, it is very frustrating when there is so little time to get to all
of the students.

The English teachers envision a center where students could be brought by
teachers from disciplines other than English, as well as from English
classes.  They also would like to see the kids able to research and validate
on-line research within the clinic.  Is it possible for a student at
Abington Heights to email a paper to a center where a tutor might take a
look and make some suggestions?

Last year we visited a center in King of Prussia and found it staffed by one
English teacher.  There were about 30 computers, and students came in and
worked as a class on papers.  We liked some of what we saw, but we would
like to go in a somewhat different direction, continuing to staff the center
as we do now, for example, so that the whole English department knows what
is going on in the writing program in all of the classes.

If there is a good software package for getting a student started on a paper
we would like to know that.  We purchased one a couple of years ago, and it
is almost useless.

Would it be absurd for us to be on Ebsco or Gale.net in a writing center?
Should those services be reserved only for the library?  Would there be any
benefits to our aligning with one of the colleges or universities for
tutoring service?  Is such a thing possible?

I have a vision of an active and interactive center where students could
have the services of their regular classroom teachers but where they could
also begin to broaden their audience.