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.