Tutoring Problems
This blog focuses your ability to set realistic expectations with students
Before responding to scenarios A & B:
- Reflect on a time in your own education where not being given the answers allowed you to better learn a concept.
- Describe the outcome of a time where you set expectations in another area of your life
Scenario A
A student arrives to your workshop session with a near finished 3-page paper. The assignment is due next class, and the student feels confident in the content of the paper. You ask the student what they want to work on or improve in workshop today, and they reply saying “I just want you to read through my paper for grammar mistakes, like commas and punctuation.”
As a tutor, you are unable to edit a student’s paper. How can you set expectations for this scenario and ensure the student understands your role in the class?
Scenario B
You are engaging in a discussion with a student about an upcoming paper. The student is bouncing around ideas for a thesis statement based on themes seen in a book the class read. They express interest in writing about extended metaphors and you support their idea and repeat back to them the concept in clearer language. The student abruptly picks up their pen and asks you to repeat the sentence you just said.
To avoid co-dependency and academic dishonesty, how can you direct this student to construct their own ideas about the topic?
Link back to Tutor Training site
Scenario A: I think, in this situation, I would ask the student if they had any difficulty with any sections of their paper or how they feel about their paper overall. What I’ve found so far is that most students who come to tutoring sessions may appear confident that they’re finished with a paper, but when I ask if they had any difficulty, they’ll pause and then admit that maybe in one paragraph, they weren’t sure of a citation, or they weren’t sure if a part of their argument “makes sense,” or something of that nature, and as we go through it together, the student will find other areas in their paper where they have questions or they aren’t sure and would like a second opinion. I’ve had maybe 2 students come to me and ask me if the paper looks good, and instead of going through it by myself, I’ll instead redirect it and ask them to take me through their paper, tell me which parts they struggled with, and then we take it from there. I try to make it so that we’re going over it together, that way I don’t become their personal editor and they actually learn something from the session.
I’ve also told students (gently and politely, of course) that I’m here to help them improve their writing, not be an editor; they have to write and revise papers on their own. If the student is a little more pushy, I’ll tell them that if they have to write a paper as an in-class final exam, they have to be comfortable looking over their own work because they won’t have access to outside editing resources, and usually this reasoning helps them realize the importance of doing it themselves.
Scenario B: I’ve had this happen a few times. I usually try to ask the student what /they/ had just said, and what they were thinking of writing about. Sometimes they may have difficulty putting their thoughts into words, but the more questions I ask to prompt them, the more they start to figure it out on their own, and when I prompt them to only use 1 sentence to describe what point they want to make, this helps them narrow down their thought into a concise sentence that they can use for a potential topic sentence or a thesis. When I’ve done this, sometimes they even start coming up with even more ideas, to which I remind them to write it all down so they have all these ideas for later. Admittedly, sometimes it’s hard to go through this with the student because I can tell they know what they want to say, and they’ve got great ideas, but articulating those ideas is what’s stumping them. It can be hard to not just repeat what I said to help them, but generally, I try to get them to put things into their own words.