AN INTRODUCTION TO TUTORING: ROLES AND RESPONSIBILITIES 

Tutoring/Writing Consulting at BHSU

First, THANK YOU! Student tutors play a critical role in the BHSU writing curriculum. The time you spend working with students truly makes a difference in their attitudes towards writing, their classes, and their academic careers. Through your dedication and skill, students will feel more connected to the university and to their classes. English 033, 101, and 201 students often find student writing consultants to be more accessible than instructors, particularly if they are new students. Furthermore, with the inclusion of the new Writing Intensive requirement for all majors, students will be doing more writing than ever, and students will bring papers from History, Political Science, Biology, Chemistry, Business, Spanish, etc.

Most of the time, you and your student writer will meet one-to-one, but some of you will have the option of conversing through email, particularly as we develop that component of the writing center. An additional section on how to tutor via communication technologies will be included in this handbook.

Tutoring can provide an excellent pre-professional experience for you. Consider it a resume-building position!

The BHSU Writing Center

As you know, the 2005-2006 school year is our first in the history of the Writing Center—so we are all operating under a certain amount of trial and error. As a group, we will be working together to develop basic operating procedures like policies, tutoring protocols, schedules, etc. We will also be working together to create resources for students and faculty like writing worksheets, tutoring forms, resources, and the Writing Center website, which will include resources for faculty, community, and students. In other words, expect some change, some evolution, and occasional mistakes—we are all going to make them. Of course, this is the nature of starting up a new venture.

The mission of the Writing Center has several components. First, the WC is designed to offer assistance for students writing papers for their Basic Writing and Composition classes. Students are also encouraged to bring essays from all of their other classes to the center, if they would like additional help, so you will likely help students with short or long papers from a variety of General Education classes. With the new Writing Intensive requirement in the majors, Junior and Senior level students might bring longer research papers to the Writing Center, too.

The WC is not just designed to help students with academic papers, however. Students working on resumes, PowerPoint presentations, letters, or even job/graduate school applications might seek consulting. We will be providing these services, too.

The Writing Center will also supply resources and consulting for faculty members. Some might want to drop by to pick up handouts or books relating to writing instruction in their classes or to review a scholarly article being written for publication.

Basically, if someone is writing or plans to write something, they are welcome to the Center.

Tutor Worries

It is completely understandable to be apprehensive and concerned about tutoring another person in how to write, especially when grades are at stake. You may feel concerns about your own level of writing skill, your ability to communicate with students, or what an instructor is “looking for” in a particular assignment. Basically, most tutors worry that they will give the wrong advice, the students will “bomb” their papers, and never come back.

But don't worry. Certainly, learning effective tutoring skills takes practice, and you might occasionally say the wrong thing or be overly praising of a paper. That is part of what this project is all about; hands-on experience is what will prepare you for the rigors of teaching; if you don’t like to work with student writers, you probably will not like teaching very much.

One of first lessons is that the strategies and techniques that work for one student will not work with another. Therefore, you will need to develop a variety of tutoring techniques, as well as develop the interpersonal skills that will help you choose a technique for each individual. This process becomes easier and easier with practice, as all new skills are. So be patient, and don’t be hard on yourself. We will have a file cabinet full of resources for you to use if you get stuck with a student.

You will likely find that your own writing improves as a result of your tutoring. After a semester of tutoring, many tutors notice an increased ability to reflect and re-consider their own work, as well as an ability to more fully understand usage and punctuation issues.

Tutoring Goals

The tutoring goals for this project focus on student writers as well as tutors. Think of your primary objectives as:

• To student writers to compose more easily, with less apprehension;
• To help writers develop their own writing process;
• To assist students with the writing process, helping them to prewriting, write, and revise their own work;
• To assist writers with moving from their own “writer-based prose” (which typically meets their own needs) to “reader-based prose” (which meets the readers’ needs);
• To help writers understand the conventions and expectations of academic writing.

Models of Tutoring

According to Christina Murphy and Steve Sherwood's book, The St. Martin's Sourcebook for Writing Tutors, there are several different instructional tutoring paradigms; these approaches have grown naturally out of composition theory research. We should go over them here because understanding the paradigms increases our awareness about what we believe to be true about writing and writing instruction. You may recognize your own beliefs about writing in one of these forms.

Current-Traditional: According to The St. Martin's Sourcebook for Writing Tutors, the current-traditional approach "focuses almost exclusively on the writer's text and its formal dimensions of grammatical correctness" (2). This strategy is not a common one for writing tutors today, because tutors working with students are far more concerned with thesis control, development, organization, and the student writer's complexity of thought. A tutor utilizing a current-traditional approach would focus primarily on pointing out the grammatical and punctuation errors. However, be aware that many students perceive that the tutor's role is to "correct" their papers, and may bring in their work expecting it to be proofread. Do not give in to that temptation!

Expressivist: An expressivist approach is generally characterized by a belief that students should write for personal discovery. Instructors using this paradigm frequently encourage independent, creative writing, where students can learn how to better express themselves. Tutors and instructors might ask the writer questions to help draw out the writer's ideas and experiences. In addition, the emphasis in this pedagogical approach would be on the individual writer working independently.

Social Constructionism: Murphy and Sherwood describe this paradigm as "focus[ing] on the sociocultural and historical settings in which writers develop their understanding of language and knowledge ... [this knowledge] is 'made' by agreement, or consensus, within discourse communities" (3-4). This view describes knowledge as not emanating from the "solitary genius" working alone, but is created as a result of collaboration, discussion, and interaction with others' ideas. This view is currently the dominating one among composition theorists.

For our purposes here at BHSU, we adhere to a more social constructionist approach to tutoring, although different instructors emphasize different paradigms. For example, many instructors teach using an expressivist pedagogy, which works exceptionally well for them and their students. You may even be able to determine what pedagogical approach your different English instructors take after considering these paradigms.

Ultimately, as a new teacher, you will find yourself gravitating to a certain pedagogical approach. Keep in mind that you might alter or shift this approach, though, as you continue your professional development.

Breaking the Ice

It is important to make your tutee feel comfortable, especially at the first few visits. Feel free to engage in some small talk for a few minutes. 

You can also ask questions like:

• What’s your schedule like this semester? How many courses are you taking?
• What sorts of writing assignments have you been assigned this semester?
• What have your experiences been, in terms of writing?
• How do you go about writing an essay? What kind of strategy do you have?
• What are your major concerns with writing? (Or, the particular paper he or she has)
• Do you have any general questions for me before we begin?

Even though students will be briefed about the role of tutors, some students may still be confused about the tutoring process. This is particularly true because most of the students will be first-year students. In the early tutoring sessions, the student writer might wonder:

• Do I have to pay for this service? (No)
• Will you proofread my papers for me? (The answer to that is NO!)
• Can I bring any type of writing assignment here, or can I only bring English papers? (Yes)
• Will my teacher find out I came here?  (Not if the student doesn’t want the teacher to know.)
• Will it matter to my teacher that I came here? (Teachers will look upon the Writing Center as a positive step.)

If you sense a tutee has these concerns but is uncomfortable voicing them, it is acceptable for you to raise these issues in a compassionate manner. The general rule is, though, that you cannot speak to any issue that is within the domain of the teacher, like in terms of the grade you think a paper might or should get.

Once You Get Started

Inexperienced writers often share certain characteristics:

• They often struggle with developing ideas or examples in their writing. They often don’t reflect sufficiently on what they have written.
• Once they write something done, they often HATE to delete it or change it. I generally regard this as the “Every word is sacred” problem.
• Writers often compose associatively, writing down their thoughts as they occur—sometimes writers do this because they worry they won’t remember what they have written otherwise.
• Writers often forget that readers aren’t in their class, or haven’t read the same materials they have, or haven’t read the assignment, or don’t live in South Dakota, etc. Therefore, sometimes writing consultants can help students with developing context

If you are tutoring 031 students, you will most likely be working with the same student all semester; if you are not, you still may find that certain students will continue coming to see you. Acquiring useful information about your tutee is essential to building trust with him or her. Keep in mind that part of tutoring involves helping the student become an effective self-advocate. In other words, you want to encourage the student to gradually take more control over his or her own work. Here are some strategies for building the trust that leads to self-advocacy:

• Ask tactful questions, being sensitive to your tone of voice.
• Listen carefully to the student writer. Make sure that after you ask a question you pause appropriately, giving the student time to relax and answer your questions. Some student writers are nervous, and see you as an authority figure. Many teachers have also found that one of the toughest issues to deal with is silence-- but it is important to learn to provide your students with lengthy pauses.
• Make empathetic comments to the student writer, like, “Yes, I can see how hard that story might be to condense,” or “I’ve always struggled with introductions, too,” but don’t traipse into terrain like, “Yeah, that teacher always gives hard assignments,” etc.
• Share information about your own experience as a writer.
• Maintain neutrality. If a student vents, just listen.
• Writers may attend tutoring sessions at any stage of the writing process. So always suspend judgment if the student comes in seemingly unprepared.
• Don’t chide the student for being “lazy”, unprepared, or unwilling to work. It’s okay to say, “Would you like to meet at a different time?”
• Don’t take pen in hand and start marking up the paper. Try to keep the writer in control at all times.
• Although it is not always necessary, it is often a good idea to give the tutee the opportunity to lay out all his or her relevant materials: notes, textbook, the assignment sheet provided by the instructor. In some cases, it is even necessary to make sure the tutee has a pencil and paper. Avoid doing much writing for the student. Whenever possible, have the student write down any suggestions, notes, or corrections to their work.
• Read over the assignment sheet with the student. Ask for an explanation of the student writer's understanding of the assignment. Ask if the instructor provided any models or additional instructions not listed on the assignment sheet. Be  non-evaluative about the assignment itself; pursue the discussion solely to establish understanding and clarification. If the assignment required outside reading, like essays from The Norton Reader, ask the student to pull out his or her textbook.
• The student may have developed prewriting, in the form of notes or lists, or she/he might have a draft in various stages. Consider these suggestions, depending on what stage of the writing process the student is in: prewriting, writing, or rewriting/revising.

Prewriting refers to the writing, thinking, and reading writers engage in before they write the first draft or part of the draft of an assignment. The tutee should bring his or her textbook, readings, handbook, assignment sheet, related notes, and writing implements. Your tutee might want to discuss:

• Her or his understanding of the assignment objectives
• Ideas he or she is thinking about using in the paper
• Organizational or developmental plans for the essay
• Readings upon which the paper is based
• Issues that emerged during class discussion
• Content captured in his or her lecture notes
• His or her composing process; the student may be looking for new ways to go about writing
• Possible topics or ideas to use in the essay
• How to focus a topic into a workable thesis
• Examples that would support an idea of thesis
• Documentation, quoting conventions, and plagiarism issues

These types of discussions are a perfectly acceptable aspect of the writing process. You may provide an important service by helping a student think through his or her paper. Encourage the student to take notes on your discussion, to draft an outline of the paper, to jot down ideas or points. Many students benefit from additional discussion about the readings they have been assigned; they may not have fully understood them in terms of vocabulary, structure, or content.

Writing refers to those activities related to composition of the first draft. This part of the writing process is often the most agonizing for students. You might:

• Assist the tutee with composing, helping him or her transform verbalized ideas into written form, which can be more difficult for the student writer than it might seem.
• If the student has developed a partial draft but is stuck, ask him or her to read the paper to you. In the process of reading the paper to an "audience," some students catch usage mistakes or points needing clarification.  Whenever possible, you want to encourage the tutee to think through his or her writing process, so the more control the tutee has over his or her written words, the better. This technique also gives the tutee something active to do; otherwise, your tutee will have to sit silently while you read over the paper, which might increase the student's stress level.
• Work with the student in terms of thesis, coherence, organization, paragraphing, word choice, audience awareness, etc., before you focus on the sentence-level elements of grammar and punctuation. In a sense, you are helping the student writer learn to critique his or her own work by temporary standing in as a sort of other, questioning self. You will be modeling for the student the kind of questions writers ask themselves as they compose.
• When beginning writers draft, they frequently see every word as "precious," and are reluctant to cut or radically rearrange content. This belief can sometimes paralyze writers, causing them to freeze when faced when the blank page. Emphasize that that "words are cheap"-- cut material can always be rewritten, ideas can be reworked or expanded. Encourage student writers to pursue undeveloped ideas or rework thesis statements. Basically, students often see writing as risky, but not as an arena where they can take creative risks. As a more experienced writer, you can help!
• If you are addressing issues of usage or punctuation in your tutoring conference, examine the draft in terms of patterns of error. You may notice that your tutee consistently misuses commas or certain verb forms. Think of the pattern of error as one error rather than numerous errors. By considering "mistakes" in this light, you can simplify your discussion of the concept to one issue, and then use the essay itself to show how the student is using a consistent pattern of error. Often, through discussion with the student, you can find out why a student makes a certain error; sometimes he or she misremembered a rule, or was taught the rule incorrectly.

Rewriting/Revising refers to any activity whereby the writer re-sees or reworks draft material. Most commonly, you will see a student bring in a rough draft, perhaps several days before the final is due. Often, though, students will bring in drafts that have already been graded by the instructor that need to be revised and resubmitted. Consider the following approaches:

• If a student has brought in a rough draft, ask him or her to read it over out loud. The student writer might interrupt his or her own reading to ask you questions or get feedback. Encourage this interruption, because such an activity is a step toward self-advocacy.
• If the student is unable to provide feedback about his or her own work, start with larger scale, or "macro" concerns, particularly with the first few tutoring sessions. Focus on writing issues like thesis/organization, development, and audience awareness. In later tutoring sessions, you can emphasize grammar and usage issues, punctuation, and word choice. Certainly, if a student has a question about something feel free to address it.    
• In your tutoring capacity, you are also playing the role of the academic audience member.   You can alert the writer to problematic sections or logical gaps that he or she may not see. You may inhabit the role of the "questioning self," which the writer has not fully developed. Through various questioning strategies, you will be able to model revision techniques.
• Encourage the student writer to further explain sections of the draft that seem weak or underdeveloped, or sections that lack the sort of fluent, logical links necessary for the audience.
• Refer the student to the revision sheets published on the WebCT site. Look under “content module”. It is also all right to go through the worksheets with the student.

You might have to explain instructor comments on a particular essay. Sometimes students will be confused about what the instructor meant, but won’t be comfortable asking the teacher. If you explain instructor comments, always be careful to present them neutrally and without judgment. Try to illustrate the comment by applying it to the student’s paper.

Although these elements of the writing process are identified as stages, keep in mind that the stages are recursive--meaning that within a particular assignment a student may prewriting, write, and rewrite simultaneously. A student may rewrite the introduction several times before proceeding onto the next stage of the draft. If a student comes to a tutoring session in the early stages of the writing process, do not be judgmental, even if they don't have a draft or anything written down. Tutors can provide a great deal of assistance in the writing process.

Responsibilities of Tutee

Student writers have certain responsibilities; although you generally want to be non-judgmental about their work, you can gently and tactfully remind them that they should:

• Have all their relevant essay materials with them at the tutoring sessions.
• Be on time.
• Be ready to work on their writing for the full half hour or more.

Special Issues

Never tell a student that a paper is “great,” “sure to get an A,” or “clearly going to pass.” Even if you have had an instructor before and have a sense of how he or she assesses written work, you must never assure a student that a certain grade is imminent. Liability issues can occur as a result of this problem.

Many of you will be required to meet your tutees in groups because of a shortage of tutors. Students are typically placed in groups based on instructor. You will function as a group leader in this case, and may engage in:

• Discussion of the assignment and the students’ perception of their writing tasks;
• Reading-based conversations, where you help students understand the readings upon which assignments are based;
• Peer editing—you can certainly request that students bring drafts with them, and help students critically read each others’ papers.

Focus on the “Macro” concerns before the “Micro” concerns if a student is beginning a paper. Students will often be confused with this approach, but just explain that in terms of the hierarchy of issues, Organization, Audience Awareness, and Development are the first tier.

• If a student is bringing a rough draft to the conference, and does not have particular concerns, begin with the “Macro” issues, like Thesis/Organization, Development, and Audience issues. See the assessment rubric attached to this handbook.
• If a student is polishing up a draft, then focus more on grammar, word choice, punctuation, etc. But DO NOT just “correct” the paper; the student should always hold the pen.
• Read sections of the paper out loud to the student, especially if there are sentence-level problems that the student isn’t “seeing” or catching. Students will often read what they want to see rather than what is actually there. Sometimes students will catch their own errors if they read their papers out loud, too.
• Demonstrating how to develop paragraphs is a typical exercise; explain what a Topic Sentence is, and then how paragraphs are developed to fulfill the topic sentence. We will have handouts and resources available so that the student can take something home.

Other Responsibilities for Working in the Writing Center

Writing Center work tends to be uneven; the beginning of the semester is particularly slow. Usually after midterm, or after students start to get papers back, the pace picks up. Since this is our first year, we need to build our clientele and establish the Center within the university.

While tutoring is “slow,” I will have additional jobs for us to do; building the website, developing resources for students, and making photocopies of materials. Also, you might be asked to visit a classroom in order to explain what we do, and what services we offer. Sometimes, you can use “free time” for professional development—reading tutoring materials, etc.

Finally,

Thanks again!

We will be adding content to this handbook throughout the year, and feel free to make suggestions about what should be added.