Blog #12 - CAS Tutoring Session

During our first tutoring session in the CAS Writing Center, none of us had students signed up to see us :( I guess that was okay because we got practice observing our classmates tutor in action. I've got to admit that it was a little chaotic at first seeing that it was only our first day there, but I'm glad we were able to get our feet wet, so to speak. I can't wait until next Monday when, hopefully, a real live student will come seeking for our help and guidance!

I was given the opportunity to observe two of my fellow classmates during our time there. I think it's safe to mention their names here since it was only practice but I don't want to risk it. I'll just say that I observed Kris (tutor) and Sarah (student) - real names have been altered. During my observation, I noticed that Kris used minimalistic techniques which seemed very effective for this session. He sat next to Sarah and only spoke when she needed ideas or had a question. Sarah had a pen in her hand and wrote on the paper while Kris sat there and watched her do the work. Sarah read the paper out loud so that the both of them could analyze and work on it together. There was not a lot of eye contact going on between them because most of the time was spent looking down at the paper. Whenever Sarah would explain something, she would talk with her hands moving around from side to side, which to many of us (including myself) is natural. Kris' comments were always positive and the session wasn't that long because Sarah only needed help with a small portion of her paper. I'm sure some of the tutoring sessions we will observe in the CAS will go like this because the students just want to go in to get help and leave. However, the student felt that she got the help that she needed so I'm guessing that that's all that matters.

Since the session was shorter than expected, Dr. Chandler decided to demonstrate how to tutor a student, so she tutored Sarah again. This time, I saw a great difference between her tutoring style and Kris'. The tutor did a lot of nodding and was very encouraging. Whenever the student would say something that contributed to the thesis statement, she would say, "Good. Now write that down." Whenever the student would say something about the paper, the tutor would restate it in the form of a question to make sure that she understood it and the information that was relayed to her by the student was correct. There was more eye contact that occured during this session than the first and again, positive feedback was given to the student - example, "That's a great title!"

At the end of the hour, I wasn't sure if I took the right notes and observed the proper elements of a tutoring session. I guess I didn't know if this would help me for my research paper, but since I'm not sure what I'm going to do for it, the notes were good enough. Unexperienced as we are at this point in time, we just need to go in with an open mind and see how it is. This is a learning process and I can't wait to see what will turn up next :)