PeerCentered

Yesterday I walked into the Learning Studio with the perspective of a student, not that of a mentee or an observer. Simply changing my ambitions for showing up ultimately seemed to have an impact on how I felt coming in. I anxiously waited on a bench for my tutor to show up. I had not met this gentleman before and was curiously scanning the room to seek out my possibilities. I had only been there for two minutes and my tutor, introduced himself to me as we made our way to a cubicle he seemed to have been sitting at. We sat down and I gave him a basic overview of what I was aiming to accomplish with the four page paper I had written for my Writing Theory class, that I needed help revising. He asked me to read the paper and I began to read the paper out loud. Once I was done,  he appeared to admired the use of details I presented to make a specific tutoring session come to life with the actions of the tutor and the student.  It was then his turn to read the paper out lou...

     I recently had the chance to observe a session with a student whose first language is nnot English, but I wouldn't go so far as to say that she's an ESL student, as her accent was thin, and she kept up in conversation. I have to admit, however, that as the session continued, the language barrier did become a bit of a focal point.      Upon arrivial, the student said that she wanted to "correct" her paper, and when pressed, admitted that correcting punctuation and vocabulary was her goal for the session.The tutor began to read through the paper and made small notes on the page. Meanwhile, the writer sat quietly and fiddled with various papers and looked generally disinterested. Upon noting this behavior, my initial thought was that this student, like others I've seen, had no desire to be at the writing center and only there to appease her instructor. Looking back, however, I realize that her fidgeting may have been related to the language (an...

I know that I'm only a sophomore, and that this project should still be relatively fresh in my memory, but for some reason I have been having great difficulty remembering what my First Year Seminar class had to do for our rationale papers. I remember the project that I did for it, and then that I had to write a paper explaining myself, but the instructions that my professor gave were particularly vague and hard to follow, and I sort of stumbled my way around the assignment. I know that during the summer the new tutors got together for a pre-class meeting and talked about these papers, but I don't live in Chicago during the summer and could not attend. Is there some website that I could go to if I wanted more information on these papers? I've googled them, but I keep coming up with results from random places that don't look as though they have anything to do with the project that I did last year. I'm asking because I had a student come in last week who asked for advi...

A few weeks ago I had a student come in who I am almost positive had a learning disability. I of course didn't ask her about it or mention anything, which would have been rude, but it was turning over in the back of my mind during our entire session. I wasn't really sure how to handle her. The ideas that her paper was trying to portray were strong, but it seemed as though she was unsure of how to communicate them to the reader. I didn't really know how to handle her. I don't know a lot about different kinds of learning disabilities, but I thought that there might have been a social protocol that I should have followed. I know that we aren't allowed to try and mentally diagnose our tutees, but it's hard to ignore it when the person is sitting directly in front of you. I wasn't trying to dig into her personal life so much as I just wanted to have a better understanding of her situation so that I could be a more helpful tutor for her. I hope that before the end...

I've been working in the WRC for about a month and a half now and can not become accustomed to the calling of "hey! are you an english person over there? I need help" to which I promptly reply, "Ok! Do you have an appointment?" "No" says the student, "Ok well we're a strictly appointment based system and right now we're completely booked but we do have a waiting list." I usually wait for the heavy sigh or the ensuing eye roll to smile cordially and thank them for their patience. We're offering a free service to the student body and yet students think that we can simply look over their work and have virtually no feedback for them. As long as they get their WRC slips to show they were there then everything's okay but when we can't accodomate their every need we are the bad guys. I should be used to this feeling of demonizing from working at starbucks during a white chocolate shortage but it still gets under my skin to be tak...

I started working at the Writing Center a month ago, which makes today my fourth Thursday as an employee. I have had a student who made a weekly appointment for Thursday morning at 9am, and then will not show up. Every few weeks her appointment would be cancelled, but she continued to reschedule and then not come in for tutoring. I thought about asking Net at the front desk to help me permanently cancel her appointment time, but I hesitated for a while. What if she had some external conflict which forced her to miss her appointments which she could not help? I didn't want to cancel her appointment permanently if she had a perfectly reasonable excuse why she kept missing them. After she missed her fourth weekly appointment in a row however, I decided that four was too many to ignore, and I asked Net to cancel her appointment. I realized that she hasn't called to give any excuse for herself, and in my mind that gave me the right to let her appointment time go to someone else.

Through my observations at the Writing Center, I have very clearly and regularly seen the prophecy of "every session is different" fulfilled. Each session has provided me with insight and direction, and has added to the formation of my personal tutoring process. However, when I walked into the WC Tuesday morning, I was unexpectedly presented with a very special gift: The Perfect Tutee. It might have been nine A.M., but this tutee was raring and ready to go. The second the tutor brought her back into the booth, she laid out her paper and proclaimed, "I need help creating a thesis statement!" From there, the two effortlessly collaborated to create a thesis statement that the tutee was very proud of. She was very committed and present in the session; her body language (chair close to the table, elbows lounging on the table, hands working quickly to scribble notes in the margins) clearly illustrated that she meant business. By the end of the fifty minutes, the tutee c...

Your humble PeerCentered Editor-in-Chief was honored with the Ron Maxwell Leadership Award  at this year's National Conference on Peer Tutoring in Writing  (NCPTW) held in Chicago, Illinois. PeerCentered has long been a supporter of NCPTW and has regularly posted materials in various formats from the conference.  With that explanation, i beg your indulgence in posting my acceptance speech for the Maxwell Award. 2012 Ron Maxwell Leadership Award I want to thank the selection committee and especially my good friend Jon Olson as well as the Maxwell family for continuing Ron’s legacy.  I also offer my humble thanks to Harvey Kail who nominated me for the award.  It is truly an honor to be listed among those who have contributed such excellent work to the field of peer tutoring in writing.  When Jon first notified me of the award, I was taken aback.  It was something I never expected, but am truly honored to receive. I also wish to thank and offer...

Recently I tutored my first session and luckily got a student who actually wanted to be there. The student I worked with had been coming to get help with her papers throughout the semester, but by choice rather than requirement. The paper she brought in for this particular session was one that she had worked on previously with other tutors and was really only looking for someone to double check her use of citations.   After reviewing her in-text citations and works cited pages I found little to be wrong; I suggested a few corrections, but this probably took all of ten minutes. Not wanting to end the session early, I asked the student if she would mind reviewing over her paper once last time with me. Though she had already worked with several tutors on the assignment and read it aloud a million times, she agreed.   After discussing the main points she made in the paper, we began to go through it sentence by sentence. She seemed to have no problem getting her ideas on pape...

This tutoring thing is becoming more intense. I dont know if its the fact of making sure we have the hours or the overwhelming observations, or just the anxiety of becoming a tutor next semester. As I sit in these sessions I begin to ask myself (I'm sure we all do) if I could handle it, because the tutors that I have observed seems so calm. Any advise or can someone relate?

I’m new at this. In fact, I technically haven’t even started tutoring officially yet. That starts Wednesday for me. It’s Friday. So I may not be the best person to talk about friendship in the tutoring session. Perhaps I can look at this post as a temporal document, something to refer to later when I have experienced the development of relationships with writers from across the table. For now, I’m just pulling from some observations I’ve made and some theories I’ve bounced around. The essential question here is, “Is it okay to be more forward– more directive– as we get to know the writer more?” My version of the short answer to this question is this: “It depends.” What a cop out, right? As soon as we get comfortable in any arena, we start to slack. Whether it’s not dressing to impress as much or putting less of an effort in, we find this a trend in social culture. In the tutoring session, this is just as much important for the writer as it is the tut...

I was fortunate to observe a session that involved multiple students and only one tutor.  Three girls greeted the tutor kindly and pulled up some chairs to sit down and discuss why they had made their way into tutoring world. One of the three girls promptly discussed this was their first visit to The Learning Studio and that they needed help adjusting a collaborated piece so that it flowed smoothly, despite their various types of writing styles and authorial tones presented. Another girl chimed in and mentioned that the transitions were like a fly stuck in bubblegum: going nowhere. The tutor laughed pleasantly and reassured he was there to help. The tutor then asked each girl to read the portion they had written. In the voices of each girl, it was highly evident they connected to the words they had placed carefully within the eight and a half by eleven pieces of paper.  The tutor himself then began to look over the piece with a pen in his hand, and the girls chatted amon...

Last week my mentor thought I was ready to take over one of his sessions. I was so nervous, he told me I would be fine and he would be there to help me out if I needed it. His session was cancelled so I thought I was in the clear, until he had a drop in. We greeted the student and explained I was a tutor in training, and if it was okay with her I would be tutoring her. She agreed and we sat down. When I asked what she needed help with she said she needed someone to go over her presentation with her. I was thinking "Oh great, I've never observed a session that had to deal with a power point presentation. Just my luck." When I asked for her assignment sheet she handed it to me and explained some of it. All I kept thinking was "I hope I know a little of what she's going to show me." When she pulled up her power point I saw it was about Promotions. My mood went from worried to I got this instantly, because I am a Marketing major. After that it was smooth sailing...

Over the course of these past few weeks I've come into the question of formality.  This is a crucially important detail in my case, for while I may appear fully able to control myself in writing, my casual conversation is heavily littered with expletives.  I don't know if it's how I was raised, the role models I chose, or just the hand I was dealt, but I find few greater joys than expressing myself with a well placed expletive and more or less speaking like a pirate.  No, I do not kiss my mother with this mouth- we're more of a hug-based family.  Anyway, I've encountered very little casual swearing during the sessions I've observed, and I'm beginning to wonder if it's due to the fact that I'm observing, and because of this the tutor is trying to appear professional and set a good example.  That's very respectable of them I suppose, but I'm a just a kid- my attention span isn't too consistent and I don't exactly have an overwhelming se...

This week in the writing center, I had the pleasure of observing some sessions. I come with one question: Is it okay to be very directive to a student if the student really does not understand? In reading much writing center theory, we learned that we should never be directive.  We must provoke an answer or thought out of a student through questioning alone. Now what if the student really does not understand? You could just keep asking the same question until he or she understands, but what good does that do? I think that some students really just need a push in the right direction. Does that make being directive acceptable? We do not want to make the student's paper our own. This defeats the purpose of the writing center and tutoring. To answer my own question, I think in some situations, a student should be directed.  I can think of times when someone asks me a question and I simply do not have an answer. I understand the question, but I just can't think of an answer no ma...

Hello Catherine Woods, and welcome to PeerCentered. Why thank you PeerCentered, I am glad to be here (finally). My laptop only seems to feel like cooperating 97% of the time, and this ended up being the 3% left over. But I digress. I am lucky enough to have begun tutoring at Columbia's Learning Studio already. This not only forced me to jump in headfirst and blindfolded, but it also gave me the chance to learn the system from the inside out. In my case I think that this was a wise decision. I learn much more efficiently by doing than by listening or reading, so the choice to begin tutoring sooner rather than later was a good one for me. This is what I have discovered so far... 1. Students secretly want you to guide them, but if you do this overtly they will work against you. Let them decide what needs to be done, and then aid them by helping them to do what they already (whether consciously or unconsciously) know they need to do. 2. Sometimes the student doesn't need yo...

Three sessions that I observed this week dealt with students who came in with a finished draft. In each session the tutor started by asking the student what the assignment guidelines were and what the actual paper was about. From there each tutor took a different approach in going over the paper with the student. One tutor read over the whole paper in great detail, pen in hand making corrections as he went along. There was an awkward silence for about fifteen minutes as the student watched the tutor silently mark up his rough draft. Another tutor went through the paper paragraph by paragraph and started asking questions about the body paragraphs before even getting to through the introduction. While some questions did seem relevant to making the paper more effective, a few suggestions made were things that were already included in later portions of the paper. The tutor failed to realize some of the techniques the student was already using since the paper had not been read in its en...

While observing in the Writing Center, I have been lucky enough to come across a session tutored by another student, like myself, and a session administered by an actual professor at Columbia College Chicago.  The differences in their methods were striking and interesting. I was clued in to how to relate to the student in different ways, and how each method proves to be successful. The session with the professor began with the exchange of jokes and anecdotes, with the professor doing most of the talking. As he warmed the tutee up to the session, she became more open, and even began to laugh along and input jokes of her own into the exchange. Although I felt slightly uncomfortable, an outsider on this friendly happenstance, I could sense the mood change. As the two dived into the paper, the sort of joking mood continued. I noticed the tutee sort of forget her anxiety about the paper, and was comfortable enough to begin to "direct" the session. The tutee left that day with ...

Today I saw a tutor do the unthinkable.  When hope was in short supply and the writer's overwhelming shyness seemed reared back and ready to destroy all chances of his benefitting from the session, a tactic which I had not yet witnessed lunged forth in a shower of gallant splendor to save the day.  This tactic:  Breaching the table-barrier. The second the session begins, every session, is when the writer sits down in that chair across from the tutor, am I mistaken?  There is occasionally some informal introduction occurring at times when eye contact is made before a seat has been taken, but the business at hand is never referred to before this crucial "sitting-down step."  Now, as the student is seated, he or she is immediately, often subliminally, made aware of the division between him or herself and the tutor due to multiple physical cues.  The first of these is the physical space created by the table that (seemingly) cannot be breached by either partic...

I just observed a session that screamed “directive.” I thought it might be useful to note some of the phrases that I found common in the session. Recognizing and acknowledging these phrases should help us better be aware when they accidentally (or intentionally) come out of our mouths. Please keep in mind that the phrases listed here are not necessarily condemned. They all fit into different levels of directiveness. Sometimes they can be a good choice, we should just be aware of them. “I think…” “I think you need to…” “I would try…” “I think what he/she wants you think to think about is…” These statements suddenly make the session about our opinion, whether we know it or not. While we may consider equal collaboration as an approach to the session, we shouldn’t forget about the other half (or more than half), the writer. “What you want to think about is…” “So you wanna think about…” “So that’s what you wanna talk about…” “So you wanna writ...

   I have gotten the chance to concentrate and take note on two totally different types of tutoring sessions. There were a lot of questions that I want to ask so bad, but instead I just payed more focus on the body languages and facial expressions of the tutors and writers.      My first session I actually was able to observe was a session with a girl that was new to the country. She came here from Asia when her step father and her found this school online. It was a long session because she spoke very little English, but the amazing thing was, she wrote it well.  I had so many questions to ask her, but I knew it was inappropriate and I had to keep my distance so I continued to observe from across the room. She would keep rejecting to read and when ever the tutor would read I would glance at her and see her constantly cover face at the end of every sentence. Then the tutor asked if she wanted to continue and she would continue to refuse.The more she refuse...

This week, I had the chance to observe various tutoring sessions in my school's writing center.  One in particular stood out to me. It was this particular student's first time to the writing center. As we waited for her tutor to come bring her back, she was visibly and audibly nervous.  She was talking to another student who just got out of a session, hearing all about what to expect.  She was most nervous about the possibility of having to read her paper out loud. Once in the session, the tutor nicely described what would happen in a session and the fact that she could get weekly tutoring if need be.  The student knew exactly what she wanted to do with her paper, and was already on a second draft. Her reaction to having to read her paper out loud was "oh no, uhh do I have to?". The tutor kindly explained that it helps to hear one's own writing read aloud, because it is a good way to catch errors.  When she started to read aloud her three page paper, the tut...

Okay, so I didn’t do that literally, but a tutor in a session that I observed a few days ago practically did. I want to very briefly talk about the effects of using a search engine in the tutoring process. While it can be an effective and convenient tool for pulling up a source that escapes you or an example that you think the writer will benefit from, Google can quickly turn into an enhanced distraction that isolates the writer and turns her against you. In the session I observed, this is exactly what happened. A writer came in to buff up her resume. The tutor turned to Google and showed her examples. This was great, but he kept returning to the screen. Sometimes she started to talk, and he would immediately turn to the search bar. With his eyes on the screen and his fingers on the keyboard, he seemed like he wasn’t listening. I wasn’t the only one picking up on this– the writer did as well. As the session went on (with more and more treks to Google), t...

As of this week, I have had my first round of observing various writers at Columbia College Chicago’s Writing Center. It is rather intriguing how each and every student has a different feeling towards writing, learning about their own writing challenges, and how to fix those challenges. The first session I observed was one that involved a girl who came in to the tutor to help revise a draft of an essay she had due for the upcoming week. She appeared to be a bit antsy but the tutor reassured her several times that everything was bound to be successful if both of them cooperated. Both the tutor and the girl sat side by side, looking over the paper. A small frown appeared over the girls face as she said, “This is so embarrassing!” as she flipped quickly through the pages. The tutor put a smile across his face and once again, trying to reassure her that he was there to help her to the best of his abilities, not judge her. It turns out the girl had an issue with using text language/slang...

So far I have observed four tutoring sessions and I feel that I've gained not only experience but confidence that I can do this. I have been nervous from the start about tutoring because I don't want to misguide anyone that comes to the Learning Studio. I fear that I wouldn't know an answer to a question or how to cite things. My mentor has helped me with these fears and reassuring me that it's not as scary as it seems.  Now on to my observations. My first observation was very short and sweet. "Jorge" sat down and said "This is going to be a short session. My teacher told me to come here. I already have written my paper but I need help to narrow the paper to the 1 page requirement." "Sam," the tutor, put Jorge's paper between them and had Jorge read his paper aloud and went paragraph by paragraph. After each paragraph Sam would say what she liked or what she had questions on. Once Jorge read his paper out loud he realized he also neede...

I have spent the last two weeks doing observations in Columbia College Chicago's Writing Center.  I have noticed a few procedures that the tutor follows to help the writer develop their writing skills.  The session starts out with the tutor asking the writer what they want to get out of the session.  After the writer explains, the tutor asks the writer to read their paper aloud.  The writer reads, and from time to time, pauses as they try to fix an error they have made.  I believe that this process of having the student read aloud is one of the most important aspects of the tutoring session.  Reading aloud helps the student hear their writing voice and identify with it.  It also aides with finding errors within the paper.  Ella, an ESL student, said to her tutor that "I found some spelling and grammar errors while reading it aloud."  Ella might not have noticed these errors if she had not spoken her written words; our brains automatically cor...

Through the few sessions I've been able to observe thus far, I've noticed a pattern or two.  The first is not the main message of this post but is necessary to mention all the same.  I have heard the exact same sentence uttered to me the second I've sat down at every session.  This sentence is "feel free to jump in."  The tutors, having undergone this exact process in order to attain the position they fill today, know that I'm there to be a fly on the wall, an anthropologist, an empty glass to be filled with the splendor that is their writing expertise.  However, they seem to want my help!  I'm just some random long haired fellow they only just met, and they want my input?  To me, this is an expression of the idea that no tutor is ever fully confident in his or her own ability.  They, we, all realize that they are not the end-all-be-all of writing, which is actually very refreshing to see at Columbia.  A lot of people I have met here have dev...