I went to the tutoring lab earlier this week and it was definitely an interesting experience for me. I noticed that the tutor must've read the book that we are currently reading in class because I believe that she used some of the techniques that are listed in there. However, there were some methods that the text mentioned not to use when tutoring someone and during my observation I saw otherwise.
A student came into the writing center to receive help for his Psychology paper. At the beginning of the session, I noticed that the tutor failed to ask the student what exactly was the paper on and what point was he trying to get across when writing it. As soon as the student walked in, the tutor took the student's paper and immediately began reading his work. I think she (the tutor) messed up on that part because when I read the text, it explains how important it is to always ask your writer questions about their paper such as why they are writing it, who are they writing it for and what have they learned while writing their paper before you as the tutor can began reading, making corrections and comments. After the tutor finished reading his work, she then started to make grammar corrections. After the tutor had basically rearranged his whole paper for him, the writer told her that the reason why his paper was structured in that way was because the professor had requested it to be in that order. I believe that had the tutor asked about his paper beforehand, she would've been able to approach making his corrections differently. When I saw that, I realized why the text mentions how important it is to ask the writer questions about the main idea of their work before reading it and changing the whole paper around. At the end, I am assuming that the tutor realized that it was a poor approach to the situation so she started to involve the student more in his work such as asking him questions, finding out why he used certain words and terms in his paper and if he thought it was appropriate to have them in his paper.
Throughout the whole session, I feel that it was more of a talking and writing/collaborative approach. The tutor allowed her student to learn by asking him effective questions that increased his word knowledge and understanding of what he wrote. Watching this session made me learn a lot about being a tutor and understand what works during a session. I would probably like to go back to her to observe her with another student just to see how she would approach them however I would like to experience other sessions with a different tutor because every tutor has different techniques when tutoring.
Hi Tiffany, my name is Wynee Ovalles and I'm in your ENG 220 class. I like how when you begin your observation that you noticed many of the do's and don'ts when it comes to tutoring from the readings and discussions that we had in class. What I've learned from your blog is that, when you observe different tutors you do see that they are all different and it's true that they all use different techniques. Not all the tutors that you observe in the Writing the Center is going to do and say the same things. Just like me, I was glad to know that you were looking forward to observing the rest of the tutoring sessions coming up. Through two of my observations that I've had the student and tutor have both have equal discussions with one another, which is called collaborative learning. I like to see collaborative learning being used because, it not only gives the tutor a chance to voice there opinion, but it gives the student a chance to say what there thinking or what works best for them. Overall, it seems like your getting a sense of how the tutoring sessions go. Good Luck with your next observation and I hope that it goes well.
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