The Beginning or Opening of a
Session
Beginning a session with a student is often the most
difficult part of any session because the tutor and student must
confront context, discuss expectations, and negotiate an attainable
goal for a session. Frequently students come to you just after
a class or from work, so they may not necessarily be in a tutoring
mindset. Breaking the ice or updating can help you get a sense of
where the student is coming from in a number of ways. Like any
relationship, you can express investment in the student by
soliciting insights from her/him, but at the same time, you need to
do that with a sense of your own personal and professional
boundaries as well as the student’s.
Besides context, the student and you need to move from
establishing rapport to having a clear sense of expectations, and
this discussion turns the session quickly towards attaining a goal
or an outcome from the session. Most frequently students come
with the expectation of resolving every lower-order concern with a
paper in one session (a.k.a. editing a paper for every
sentence-level error). As writing consultants, we often want
to deal with the writing process in a broader sense and focus on
higher-order, conceptual, and argumentation issues. Ultimately, you
and your students must come to an understanding that you
cannot:
- suggest topics to address or write their papers
- resolve every writing issue in a single session
- evaluate their papers
- work without their active participation in the session
- proofread or edit their papers
- interpret reading for them
At the same time, students need to know we can:
- support their growth as writers in all aspects of the writing
process
- use each session to advance their semester-long goals of
becoming better writers
- offer techniques for self-assessing their writing (what they do
well, what they need to work on)
- help them assess and become more aware of their strengths and
weaknesses as writers
- focus sessions on concrete, specific goals and/or addressing
their weaknesses
- provide a range of strategies and resources for developing a
plan for writing, revising and editing papers
- help them learn the necessary skills to read texts better or to
develop questions for classroom discussion or conferences with
teachers
As you will notice below, talk about expectations for and
limitations of tutoring parallels a first meeting with the student,
and reinforcement about what we can and cannot do as consultants
and as a writing center is sometimes critical work. Once in a
while, this talk of managing expectations can produce conflict
because what you can give the student is not necessarily the
support the student wants. Still, these expectations are a
benchmark so that students get consistent and fair treatment across
the board from all consultants. To put it another way, we want
to assure students, faculty and administration that the tutoring
experience is relatively similar from one tutor to
another. For example, agreeing to proofread or evaluate a
paper puts other consultants and students in an awkward,
inequitable position because they are not being treated the
same. On the other hand, if students come to the center
knowing that requests for proofreading or evaluation are redirected
to learning strategies for proofreading or directed
self-evaluation, they not only are getting a shared, common
experience, but also are growing their agency as writers.
Related to this discussion of expectations is the task of
goal-setting for sessions. This talk is also a delicate
negotiation. Asking a student, “what can I do for you today?”
can put a tutor in the position of saying, “Well, actually I can’t
do that. . . .” However, posing the question, “what would you
like to learn today?” sounds both artificial and like an offshoot
of a Microsoft commercial. One technique that some use is to
have the student do some quick self-assessment in relation to the
text (assuming the session will be paper-driven):
- What is the assignment? What are you working on?
- When is this paper due?
- What are you arguing? What do you want to say?
- What are you doing well? What do you need to work
on?
- Among these things (the well, and the not so well), what would
you prefer to focus on today?
The trick in this situation is to break down umbrella terms and
phrases. For example, if a student needs to work on grammar, ask
her what she means or ask the student what “grammar-problems” her
professors have told her about. If the session is going to focus on
“local” concerns, you’ll avoid conflict by getting the student to
identify what aspect they want to learn ahead of
time. Sometimes students will not have the insider’s language
to specifically identity the exact problem they need to know; in
such cases, use one of the strategies detailed in the “Revising
without Professor’s Comments” or “Dealing with General
Sentence-level Error” article on St. John’s Central. Since our
center meets with students on a regular, weekly basis, the student
and you can also build from prior sessions.
Ultimately, if you plan on five to ten minutes for “opening” a
session and five to ten minutes for “closing” or wrapping up a
session, the student and you have between forty and fifty minutes
to accomplish significant work. So you both need to negotiate
some goal that is “do-able” in the time available and a goal that
leaves the student knowing more about the writing process than
before she met with you.
The Middle or the Real Action
Once you have settled on a goal for the session, the student
and you have any number of ways to proceed. The important
thing to keep in mind is to achieve learning through practice and
application. In later sections of this handbook, we have a
number of techniques to assist you with planning sessions,
conferences focused on building argument, revision sessions and the
like. Across all techniques, a philosophy (or pedagogy)
centered on student-driven, student-centered learning dominates,
and we also emphasize a non-directive approach to building
knowledge. At minimum, this mindset means students own the session
and their paper. To facilitate such interaction, sit side-by-side
and keep the paper in front of the student. Also, have him or
her write down his/her own changes and notes, and write your own
notes on a separate piece of paper. Once you hold a paper or begin
writing on the student’s text, you have subtly shifted ownership of
the session and paper to you. If you sit across a table from
the student, you’ve created a symbolic and literal gulf between you
and student; rather than collaborate on learning, the separation of
space connotes a power differential (the “expert,” the
“knowledge-keeper” vs. the “novice,” the “knowledge
seeker”). In contrast, sitting alongside each other enables
you and the student to share the paper, to read it together, to
dialog over aspects of concern.
A “teaching with practice” pedagogy generally involves learning
what students know and do not know, assisting them to
discover/learn what they need to know, having them apply this
knowledge to the given area of concern, and assessing whether they
have acquired that knowledge (do they get it?). Assessing
students’ knowledge involves asking questions geared toward them
disclosing what they know: for example, in a session on
paragraphing, a tutor might ask, “What are body paragraphs?” or
“What function does a body paragraph serve?” or “What does a reader
expect to find in a body paragraph?” Depending on the
student’s response, a tutor can fill in gaps, “Typically a body
paragraph does. . . .,” or a tutor can turn to a writer’s reference
text, juxtaposing strong and weak paragraphs. The elements of
a strong paragraph--coherence, unity, and focus--can come to light
and be modeled. Once the student has this base of knowledge,
she and you can turn to her paper, have her self-diagnose with your
assistance, notice patterns of problems, and move to another
paragraph for application.
Connected with the physical set-up of sessions and the general
pedagogic approach, dialogue during sessions needs to disrupt usual
teaching power dynamics and encourage collaboration. Since we
are not teachers in the usual classroom sense, we must be vigilant
to not become evaluative of or directive to students who work with
us. Though at times we may sound passive or like amateur
therapists, turning directive statements (e.g., “This sentence
isn’t clear to me.”) to non-directive questions (e.g., “Would you
tell me what you’re trying to say in this sentence? How is
what you said different from what you wrote?) upends the power
embedded in “telling students what to do” and redirects our talk
toward empowering students to rethink and acquire agency over their
own voice and writing. At the same time complete orthodoxy on
either end of the directive/non-directive continuum is not
reasonable; consultants will sometimes need to adjust their styles
to compensate for student learning needs, but we must, in any
situation, be self-reflexive about our choices and solicit feedback
from students, fellow consultants and the Writing Center
director.
The End
The closing of a session is the most likely slighted, yet
most critical stage of a session. Saving approximately five to
ten minutes at the end of a session allows the student and you to
summarize what you have dealt with during the session, assess what
you/she/he have learned, and develop a plan for the next session.
Like our pedagogy during the earlier parts of the session,
students’ insights are extremely important: we can get a sense of
what they now know that they did not know prior to coming to the
session; we get an idea of what learning techniques work; we get
insight on what students want to do in future
sessions. Moreover, the student walks away with a clear
awareness of what she accomplished and what she wants to deal with
in the future.