Tutoring Basics: Preparing for a Tutoring Session
This blog helps you build a series of useful tutoring plans
Imagine one of your students brings in a completed paper from the Composition course, and needs a lot of help with its organisation. Using the hand out: “How to Prepare for a Tutoring Session,” outline:
- How you would begin the session to accomplish this goal
- How you would encourage the student to participate in activities to help them learn about organisational strategies
- How you would end the session to facilitate understanding & application
- How you would set the student up with activities to practice on their own to help prepare them for the next session
As you are writing this outline:
- Be specific about some of the questions you might ask and the activities you will prepare for this student.
- Using Isabelle Thompson’s article Identify the most effective method of communication you will use (direct instruction, cognitive scaffolding or motivational scaffolding)
- Referencing Gibb’s Communication Model, be mindful of how your language can influence this particular communication climate.
*Use this model to draft out tutoring sessions for different aspects of the writing process so you can build a repository of reusable plans (this will save time and help you feel more prepared for sessions)
Link back to Tutor Training Site
Before we officially start working on anything, I would ask the student what they have brought to the session. Once I know what they would like to work on, I will ask them to give me a brief overview of their topic, their specific argument, and some of the claims they have to back up said argument. After, I will skim the piece to get a gist of their writing style, and then I will ask them if there are any areas within their paper where they had any trouble/weren’t sure about what they’d written. Usually students respond positively to this and they may indicate a paragraph, a citation, or a sentence where they felt iffy about how it was worded, how it tied in with their claim, etc., and from there, we can discuss ways to fix the error (I generally try to prompt the student and ask questions like, “if it sounds wordy, how do you think we might make it sound more clear and concise?”). When looking at errors, I try to use language that I would want someone else to use with me on my own work and I try to gently prompt the student to get them thinking about how they might fix things so that they’re kind of forced to work with their own writing instead of just handing it off to me (which they aren’t supposed to do anyway but a lot of them think that that’s what tutoring means). After something is fixed, I would ask the student to go through their work and see if they notice similar errors anywhere else before we move onto a different type of error.
As far as Isabelle Thompson’s article, I’ve noticed that I tend to do a mix of all three communication models. It all depends on the student and how they respond, how they feel about their writing (some students are more receptive to feedback than others), and how well they understand the assignment.
To end the session, I will ask the student if they have any other questions concerning what we went over, and if they don’t have any, I’ll ask them if they can explain how they might fix that error in the future if they encounter it in their writing. I’ve done this all semester and it seems to work well for many students, even ones who may not necessarily enjoy writing/revising.