May 29, 2106: My Tutoring Philosophy

Committed. Reliable. Thoughtful. Thorough. Specific. Patient. I hope these six words will accurately describe me as a writing tutor. My professional background informs my interest in and approach to tutoring at least as much as my academic background does. I spent eight years, before attending graduate school, doing editorial work in book publishing, and there I learned the value of engaging with writers as writers. The successful editor-author relationships I observed and, in a few fortunate cases, cultivated, ran on collegiality and shared commitment to helping the author articulate and develop his or her vision for a project. I was never the expert, and rarely the senior partner, in these relationships; the first author whose book I acquired and oversaw on my own was embarking on a new career in his fifties. Instead of helping my authors with content, I learned, instead, to help them with, and to support them throughout, the act of writing. Among other things, I saw firsthand that, especially when looking at drafts, responding with queries was far more generative than responding with evaluation or correction.

I am grateful for this training course because it’s offered me some concrete strategies for helping students to inhabit the role of author and for encouraging them to take ownership of their own ideas and their own prose. In my application for the tutoring position, I wrote that in the past I have sometimes struggled to translate a professional editorial ethos to work with students. Students’ ideas are rarely as developed as authors’, their goals are often more malleable, and, even when their ideas are quite well developed, their confidence in their own expertise remains less secure. I found the detailed study of tutoring techniques by Michelene Chi’s team valuable in thinking about these issues. Chi’s metrics—for instance, that an effective scaffolding episode will often take 5 to 10 “turns” between tutor and student—are a big help in understanding how to translate a non-directive ethos into effective practice during a half-hour one-to-one session. I saw some of these principles in action in my second takeover session. In that session, the tutee noticed something pretty fundamental about the organization of his writing very late in the session, but the realization clearly resonated more deeply because he came to it while walking me (and the observing tutor) through the piece a second time.

I value guidelines like these because of a keyword in my pedagogical philosophy that merits more explanation, the word “specific.” As a classroom instructor and (I hope) as a tutor, I am very detail-oriented in thinking about my own practice. When I TAed and taught PWR, I made it a point, after each class period, to make note of five things that went well and five things that might have been more effective. I certainly won’t be able to do this after each tutoring appointment, but I do aim to do it after each shift. My experience in the classroom has been that, if I project being prepared and engaged, I elicit more engagement from students, and, if I project that I will continue to think about a session after it ends, I encourage them to keep thinking about it, as well. I hope to share this ethos with some of my tutees, by prompting them, just as I make very specific resolutions about my teaching practice, to formulate and share specific resolutions about writing practice.

May 11, 2016: tutoring takeover #2 reflections

Grad tutor Sam Holley-Kline kindly let me take over a half-hour Tuesday afternoon appointment with an undergraduate. I introduced myself to the student in the hallway, and we chatted briefly while Sam was finishing up with a prior tutee. My tutee identified as a first-generation low-income college student and frequent Hume Center visitor. His enthusiasm about the Center was heartening. In this case, he had come into the center for help writing an e-mail to a prospective employer. He was renewing a past correspondence with a contact there, and there was a personal situation that he needed to explain. The student already had a draft and was worried both about length and tone. He wanted to shorten the e-mail, and he also wanted to come across as professional and as enthusiastic, without seeming too personal or too desperate.

With the situation laid out, my first move was to reassure the student, based on my own experience working in an office, that anxiety about this sort of correspondence was normal and to acknowledge how smart it was to put time and effort into writing business e-mails carefully. I also offered some rough guidelines, from experience and a few business advice books that I know, so the student had some rules of thumb he could depart from or not, based on his sense of the situation and his relationship with the correspondent. These were: first, a rule of thumb about the length of such business e-mails (definitely under 500 words, preferably closer to 250, though this depended on the importance of the background he needed to communicate); second, a possible strategy, to send such an e-mail as a reply to prior correspondence and cut the reply thread down to the most recent two or three e-mails, so that the recipient could scroll down and quickly see where she had left things last time; and, third, a tip about the mechanics of composing such an e-mail—we copied the text out of the student's e-mail program into MS Word, so that we did not accidentally send it while composing, and so that he would leave the session with his original draft still intact.

He felt overly familiar with the text of the e-mail himself and asked me to read it aloud. I did, encouraging him to listen as I read from the recipient's point of view and, based on his concerns about length and tone, think of whether it was clear to her what she was being asked to do, how each piece of information was relevant to that, and whether the order she was receiving it in was easy to follow. After a first read-through, the student took control of the keyboard, and we repeated these prompts as he scrolled through each paragraph.

On this first go-round, the student ended up condensing the information about his personal situation and his Stanford program, making the information about his professional goals and experience related to the internship more specific and more prominent. As he knew the Hume Center's tutoring practice, we quickly fell into a rhythm where he generated language or made edits and I occasionally offered an informal correction that I thought might go unnoticed, like, "Okay, grammar thing—dangling participle." When the student expressed discomfort with certain sentences as he came to them, I made observations about the sentences or paragraphs, like, "Well, the request is phrased as a question," and this was occasionally successful in allowing him to identify what was bothering him. I noted we were close to the half-hour mark, had been through the e-mail once and done a good job of tightening and focusing it, though the student should go through it all again, and asked if he had other priorities.

I did note we had an open slot after this and that I could work over time, if okay with Sam. Sam confirmed, and the student wanted to work further. Since Sam had been taking some notes and I had just looped him into the conversation, the student asked if he had opinions, as well, and Sam pulled up a chair for a second pass-through of the e-mail, which we all did together for another 20–25 minutes of the open appointment slot. Sam followed up on some questions about the order of information that had been raised earlier, and, on a second round of prompting, some of it more direct about how quickly the recipient could see what she was being asked, the student could now see that the order of some of his paragraphs might change further—in particular, that he might consider moving his actual request to the employer earlier in the e-mail. When we wrapped, we had been through two rounds of revision on the e-mail, one of 30 minutes involving only the student and me and one of between 20 and 25 minutes involving the student, Sam, and me.

Sam handed the session to me to close. The student told us he was going to continue working and had narrowed his goal to working further on one paragraph of the revised (MS Word) e-mail, which he was going to reread against the version of the same paragraph in his original (e-mail program) draft. This sounded good; I only added that, since the student said, in the e-mail, that his updated resume was available on request, he might also consider updating his resume before he sent the e-mail, so that if the recipient did request the updated resume, he could send it quickly. After he acknowledged this, I closed by expressing hope the session had been helpful, noting that a willingness to spend an hour or two to make an important e-mail rhetorically effective was one of the marks of a successful workplace communicator, that it was always smart to get advice on job materials from multiple people, and that the student could return to Hume if he wanted more help. Sam and I then briefly debriefed.

Some things that worked: Sam confessed he had never seen a student come in before for help writing correspondence and agreed that, in this case, offering some rules of thumb from my own office experience was helpful in getting things started. He felt the tips were appropriately couched in motivational scaffolding (e.g. about successful business people spending a lot of time on these things, too). Sam also thought it was helpful that, whenever asked about wording, I offered multiple alternatives. I wish the student had noticed one major point about the order of information that came out on our second pass-through earlier, but perhaps he simply needed to go through the material more than once.

Some things that I could do differently: Sam suggested two very concrete tweaks when we debriefed afterward. First, when I was looking at the student's e-mail and suggested we should work in Word, instead of the e-mail program, and the student agreed, I then opened Word and copied the text into a file, as he had already asked me to read it. Sam suggested I could have asked the student to do this, and then tilt the screen back to me to read, to affirm his control over the written material. Another useful tweak he noted is that, when asked how something felt or sounded to me, I sometimes expressed my response and followed it with the question "Does that make sense?" Sam agreed it is good to return the ball to the student by asking a question, but suggested favoring questions like "What do you think?" that couldn't be answered "Yes" or "No."

May 3, 2016: tutoring takeover #1

On Monday night Tierney O'Rourke kindly allowed me to take over a 30-minute tutoring session with an undergraduate history student working on an honors thesis. The tutee was revising her thesis to turn in next week. She had been in Hume to see a different tutor earlier the same day and had returned in the evening for a follow-up. The tutee had two areas of priority in her work: she was writing an abstract of the thesis to turn into her advisor the same night, and she was starting to revise her third chapter. As she oriented me to the project, I asked what her goals were for the session. We focused on the abstract of the thesis, looking at it in tandem with some material from the in-progress chapter, since she was turning the abstract in later that night. The student felt extremely familiar with the text, which she had read aloud recently. Since I had to take a couple minutes with the abstract anyway, I offered to read about a paragraph and a half aloud, in the hopes that we would notice certain patterns, as we looked at her laptop screen together. She also produced and shared some related language from the opening of her third chapter.

The student's topic struck me as extremely fresh and exciting, and the first paragraph of the abstract communicated this sense of excitement. The second paragraph lost that excitement and focus by shifting from the narrative mode of the opening into a much more descriptive, expository mode. At the same time, the abstract could have made much clearer why this had to be a thesis-length project, rather than a shorter paper. After I had read enough aloud to sense these related concerns, I turned the laptop back to the student and asked for clarification in several places. As I did, I tried to prompt the student to notice two patterns, one syntactic and one structural, that contributed to the slow-down and caused some confusion in the second paragraph, patterns that felt to me closely related.

Syntactically, most sentences had some form of "to be" as the main verb. As a result, the agency of both the student as writer and the figure she was writing about seemed to vanish. This could actually make it harder, I worried, to distinguish between exposition and the student's own points. I tried to get the student to notice this by encouraging her to look to some more active sentences from her own chapter writing, then encouraging her to rewrite a couple of the "to be" sentences in the abstract.

Structurally, the abstract also could have helped to strengthen the sense that the project needed to be a thesis by communicating what the chapters of the thesis would be. I tried to connect this structural concern to the concern about language, not only by asking about the chapter structure and order of chapters several times, but also by prompting the student to supply active verbs for what she was doing in each chapter. Based on this prompting, she added a skeletal overview of the chapters that, in three or four sentences, communicated a clearer sense of the project's organization and significance. This thumbnail connected more clearly (to me) to the material that she had shared from her chapter; I heard more of the sense of enthusiasm from the opening of the abstract as she read it out, both in her language and her voice.

With a few minutes left, I noted the time, echoed her own enthusiasm and interest in the project, and expressed hope that she found the session helpful. I also affirmed the importance of the task, stating that these pieces—abstracts and summaries—could be really crucial not only for readers in orienting themselves but in helping her to get more targeted feedback from her advisor that would help her in revising the body. The student indicated that she intended to keep coming back to Hume as she continued to revise.

A few things that I thought worked: In a few cases where the student's own language was not forthcoming, I prompted by offering alternatives or by offering partial suggestions phrased as questions about what the right terminology would be. I always tried to use language that was too informal or uncertain to be copied directly. The student did all writing on her laptop, in her own words, and read it aloud after producing it. I avoided speaking while the student was writing; when she read her own writing aloud, I answered a couple direct questions about which word choice or phrasing sounded better to me, and I sometimes suggested that the student repeat key words from elsewhere in her own prose to make connections stronger. I am pleased both that the material that she generated was in her own words, and that she said it was a start and she would continue to revise it.

A couple things that I would have done differently: Though I was very mindful of the time, I wish I had communicated that mindfulness in two ways. First, I could have suggested outright at the start that we keep the short session time in mind when setting goals. With more time, we might have worked further on how to connect work on the abstract to work on the student's chapter. I could have made clearer at the start that these forms of work really were connected, but that the very short time of the session would constrain what we could do. Second, I also wish that I had noted the time left aloud when 10–15 minutes remained, to give the student an explicit chance to redirect then, if she wanted one.

April 24, 2016: Week 5 reading reflections

The readings for this week—the Hume Center's philosophy statement about multingual language learners (MLLs) and Sarah Blazer's article on linguistic inclusivity in writing centers—caution against imposing linguistic homogeneity and emphasize helping multilingual students develop their own voice in their writing. Blazer encourages tutors to think of the different Englishes that we all use in different contexts to help them connect with students' experience as language learners. This reminds me of my own experience in a French-language immersion program at Middlebury College, where students pledge, for the duration of their six- or seven-week stay on this isolated campus in rural Vermont, only to read and communicate in the language they are studying. I remember how psychologically taxing the experience was, as I had to accept that my personality in French was, in many ways, different and less developed than my personality in English, but I was only able to learn by throwing myself into a lot of situations that were potentially uncomfortable and embarrassing. I ended up, for instance, participating in the school play as a comic character—a drunken department store Santa Claus—probably not the role I would have ended up with had I auditioned in English.

The Blazer article prompted me to realize that this experience is a bit like everyone's experience in higher education of learning to write in the new language of a discipline. Graduate students especially are prompted to develop a new, research identity in this language, and your scholarly identity as a graduate student could very well end up different than the one you expected or projected for yourself, depending on who your advisors are and the course of your learning and research. Certainly, a lot of the same humility is required of all Ph.D. students, though I can imagine that for MLLs this process must sometimes be especially stressful. The attitude that we are all language learners—that much disciplinary learning is, in fact, a form of language learning—seems like a helpful frame of mind to maintain in these instances of cultural exchange. Still, I wish the Blazer article had offered more specific examples of how the inclusive ethos that her center fosters behind the scenes among its tutors actually plays out in one-to-one sessions with MLL students. Perhaps we can talk more in class about how to practice this philosophy on the ground.

April 20, 2016: Week 4 reading response

The readings that we were asked to write about for this week—Walker, Savini, and Clark—all offer genre theory as a solution for the writing tutor who needs to work with students from different, sometimes unfamiliar, disciplines. A tutor who is not familiar with, say, a lab report or a scientific paper, can coach a student writing one to identify, read, and imitate generic models from within her discipline—this is the hope. The concept of "genre" at play here is, significantly, an idea of genre from rhetorical rather than literary theory. Irene Clark thus describes genre as a mode of address within a discourse community. As a mode of address, a genre has certain formal features, but what students really need to understand are the purpose those features serve. In some cases—like a dissertation prospectus—a literature review section may be there to validate your choice of a topic, and may function principally to indicate that an issue is complicated, people are interested in it, and there are various conflicting positions one could group in certain ways. The literature review in a published paper, however, serves a different function; here it would be more important to validate and contextualize your results than to demonstrate to the readers of a journal that you've done your homework and that people care about the topic.

Catherine Savini's advice about helping students search out and identify model texts resonated very strongly with my own experience as a graduate student. I could place a journal article because I read journal articles. I struggled mightily with the first chapter of my dissertation, though, until I began reading other dissertations in my field. This makes sense. Research requires me to read published books in my field constantly, so book chapters were the closest models that I had to dissertation chapters in length and scope. As I realized, though, book chapters in my field make bigger claims and synthesize far more material than dissertation chapters. At least in my own case, I had ways of finding good model dissertations, and conducted a smaller version of Kristin Walker's experiment: I looked for dissertations that my advisors had been involved with and, among those, prioritized dissertations that had won department prizes. I therefore feel pretty comfortable with Savini's recommendation that writing tutors help students find and read other model texts. I do have one reservation about this: I hesitate about spending a lot of time close-reading a single example that a student could follow as a template, because, really, immersion in examples should be the goal. I know it's no accident that I placed a piece in a journal that I already read regularly, not in a journal that I picked up and read one sample article from. Similarly, I read a few dissertations, not just one, before the act of reading them became really helpful. To some degree, I think the tutor should be encouraging the student to seek out examples, perhaps by brainstorming ways to find them, rather than offering any single example as a blueprint.

April 20, 2016: Tutoring observation #2

For my second tutoring observation, I sat in on a session yesterday afternoon between PWR lecturer Erik Ellis and a student working on a research proposal for a PWR 2 course. The session began with the student orienting Erik E. to his topic and to the broad categories in which he had grouped the sources listed in his research proposal. Importantly, the student already had instructor comments on the proposal and was thinking about next steps. I noted that Erik E. registered these as something to look at when he asked the student what other specific aspects of the proposal he wanted feedback about. The student's proposed topic, the philosophical implications of a particular videogame, sounded very expansive, and the instructor comments suggested some concern about scope. I noted, however, Erik E. did not follow up on this concern in a critical or negative way. He let the student talk, sometimes at length, and occasionally interjected with questions along the lines of "How many sources do you have?", "How much can you cover in the scope of this proposal?", "Is that the aspect that interests you?", and "How much of the rest of it do you think you'd change if you wanted to emphasize that aspect more?" These questions were effective in guiding the student toward doing the limiting work himself. In the course of the session, the student moved from expressing a very general interest in philosophy and humanity as expressed in the videogame to a more specific interest in agency and the freedom the player had or didn't have to act in the game.

Erik E. maintained a personally reserved but intellectually engaged demeanor throughout the session, and I noted several techniques that he used to encourage active participation on the student's part in addition to asking open-ended questions. When he asked, for instance, "How many sources do you have?", this functioned as a prompt for the student to count, although Erik E. could have counted sources listed in the proposal himself. The student's answers to questions were sometimes involved, and Erik E. used engaged body language, nodding and leaning forward while always looking either at the student or his writing, as well as verbal cues registering engagement or understanding to indicate that he was following along as the student spoke (e.g. "Sounds interesting," "Yeah," "Hmmm," and "Great topic"). About 10 minutes into the session, after the project had been laid out and the central issues seemed relatively clear, Erik E. paused to read the student's conclusion, which the student had expressed concern about at the start, more carefully, in addition to reviewing the instructor comments. I note that before doing this he indicated to the student that he was going to take a few minutes to read the material.

April 14, 2016: Week 3 reading response

The readings for this week—Brooks on minimalist tutoring, Corbett on tutoring ethics, and Chi et al. on tutoring research into effective tutoring—tilt on the whole toward favoring a non-directive style of tutoring. Corbett makes an important modification to Brooks' method by pointing out that tutoring styles should adapt to different phases of composition. At the brainstorming stage, a truly Socratic, non-directive approach focused entirely on eliciting the student's own ideas makes good intuitive sense. Leaving aside issues of ethics, a student thesis statement, topic, or argument must be one in which the student feels invested. Personally, I would rephrase Corbett's opening question ("what stage is the draft at?") slightly and instead ask when the essay is due, so that I know how realistic it is to focus on questions that might require wholesale revision. If a piece is due the next day, it may well be more realistic to focus on concerns such as answering a substantive counterargument than raising lines of inquiry that might necessitate extra student research. It's unclear to me what Brooks would say about this, because he seems so interested in defining tutoring by what it shouldn't be. The Chi et al. piece was more helpful and concrete in quantifying what these interactions may look like. I appreciated Chi et al.'s metrics—in particular the data that students in a successful tutoring session ask 8 "deep" questions an hour and that a productive scaffolding exchange commonly consists of 5 to 10 successive questions from the tutor.

I guess my lingering question would be whether or not tutors should articulate their tutoring philosophy to the students. As a classroom instructor, I have always been encouraged to articulate clearly the purpose of each assignment or exercise. I don't think I have seen or participated in a tutoring session, though, where the tutor began, after assessing the state of the assignment, by explaining, "Okay, so this tutoring session will be more helpful to you if you do most of the work; you should consider yourself in a safe space, but 'on,' right now." I tend to think this kind of transparency might help to head off some of the defensive and resistant encounters that Brooks describes. It also might prompt the student to be forthright if she wants something different; direct engagement with pages she has brought, for instance. There is a lot of slipperiness in these readings about the terms editing (by which I think Brooks means line-editing), proofreading, and copy-editing—all very distinct functions in a publishing context, and all skills that people can learn. If a student truly wants help editing her paper line by line (and the work seems appropriately developed), I think it is possible to offer advice about how to do this and to walk her through a part of the process using the same non-directive, question-based approach that works for brainstorming—even though the task might not seem as much fun.