April 6, 2016: Tutoring observation #1

Earlier this evening I observed graduate tutor Mark Gardiner in a half-hour appointment with a freshman student working on a rhetorical analysis for PWR 1. The student reported that she was having a hard time starting her assignment and wanted to run her thoughts and a tentative thesis by someone. I noted that Mark's first question was to ask when the assignment was due. The fact that the student had several days allowed the conversation to take a more exploratory direction. Mark asked her about the piece she had chosen and to walk him through the elements of it that she wanted to discuss. As they fleshed out the students' observations, I noted that Mark wanted to confirm that her set of terms was the same as his (ethos, pathos, logos, rhetorical triangle) and encouraged her to ask the instructor in class whether there was an expectation that all these terms be used in the essay. In the last few minutes of the session, I noted that Mark redirected conversation to the student's thesis statement and encouraged the student to connect it to an observation that she had seemed particularly excited about, about the emotional appeal of a particular anecdote from the piece that she discussed in detail. This final exchange seemed effective in encouraging the student to think about a thesis that would make a more specific point about the particular piece being discussed.

Throughout the session, Mark appeared very in control of his body language, using hand gestures effectively and judiciously for emphasis, especially using them to punctuate or enumerate when he was making multiple points or offering a suggestion with multiple parts. The physical configuration gradually shifted from, in the beginning, the student and Mark each looking at and talking about the piece of writing on her computer, to, toward the conclusion, the student and Mark speaking directly to one another, with the student breaking away occasionally to type out a note. I noted that very close to the halfway point of the session, Mark checked with the student to see if she was finding what they were doing helpful, or if there were other things she wanted to discuss. At this point, the student indicated the approach was helpful and stated she would probably seek another appointment once she had more written; this information seemed helpful in pacing the rest of the session. I also note that Mark framed statements about confusion as queries and, in these queries, cast himself rather than the student as the subject, for instance, "Am I off base in thinking that these three things are mixed up here?" (rather than, for instance, "You seem to have mixed up these three things a bit").