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.