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.
Erik,
ReplyDeleteThank you for this pithy response to the three readings. I hadn't thought about Brooks arguing his tutoring approach negatively -- but I think you're right! We continue to teach him because he articulates a number of legitimate reasons for a minimalist approach (the fear of passive writers and egocentric tutors) as well as now-standard tutoring best practices: don't touch the pen/keyboard, sit side by side.
I like very much your adjustment to Corbett's question -- we have to know both where the writing is at and when it's due to help us make strategic decisions about our flexible tutoring practices.
Re: articulating our philosophy. I think it can help when you sense a student is resistant. (But I work pretty hard not to get to that point . . . ) If you sense frustration or confusion, I think it can help to give the student a choice -- e.g., "in the time that remains, we can work through these next few paragraphs closely or we can sketch the structure of your argument on the white board to assess the structure of your argument. . . " It can help to give the student some choice in how the session unfolds throughout the session (and not just at the beginning). And, yes, later this quarter I will talk about how we might continue to use non-directive strategies as we work at the sentence level (as well as some instruction). My standard line is -- I can't do all the copyediting for you, but I can help you become your own best copyeditor.
Sarah
Thanks for these thoughts, Sarah! On articulating philosophy, Alex and Sam, the grad tutors who visited our course on Friday, suggested that asking a student whether they've been to Hume before can also be a useful question to ask, along with the more project-specific questions, at the start of a session.
DeleteI'm interested to hear your tips on teaching editing skills later on. In my own experience writing and editing, it can help a lot, especially with longer projects, to break down copy-editing/proofing into several discrete "passes" instead of trying to correct too many aspects of a long paper at once in a final read-through. A model more like, for example, "first pass, I am going to check facts, quotations, and the spelling of names, and mark them as checked; second pass, since fact-checking has already been done, I am only going to check my own spelling and grammar; then, I am going to go through and put citations in the right format" (or some other version; the specific stages would depend on the project and author).