Brainstorming & Conversational Tutoring: A Case Study
This blog provides an opportunity to practice, observe & reflect on tutoring techniques to foster research & idea development
“Conversation is the vehicle through which tutors operate… It is through conversation that tutors work with students to help them become better writers, not necessarily correcting them, but talking them through [for example] how to fix their grammar issues so they can learn to be independent.”
Apply some of the techniques on brainstorming and conversational tutoring in Unit 8 to one of your tutoring sessions. This will be especially interesting if you have a student who struggles to develop ideas for an assignment. Outline the student’s difficulties. Then write about the process you went through and the techniques you applied to try and help that student. Reflect on the effectiveness or limitations of these techniques for that particular situation.
What did you learn from this process that will be helpful for future tutoring sessions?
Note: Please do not use a tutee’s real name: refer to Student X or Y
In some of my sessions, I tried a version of the “journalist” method (where you ask “who, what, when, where, why, how”) and I found that it worked especially well with a few students who struggled to come up with ideas for research paper topics. When they admitted that they weren’t sure what to write about, I would ask them what they’re interested in, whether it be current events, hobbies, popular media, etc., and then I ask them what they know about it/what they might like to know more about this specific interest, and then from there, we would discuss who their audience might be, why this topic matters to them/the audience, the relevance of the topic (when and where events pertaining to it take place/have taken place), etc. This always worked in getting a conversation started, and then the more we would talk things out, they would grab a piece of paper and write down their thoughts. I had three students who benefitted greatly from this method and they ended up with research topics they were enthusiastic about and wrote wonderful papers on.
I also had one student who explicitly admitted that he knew what he wanted to write about, and he had great ideas for his paper, but the problem was putting his ideas on paper, so I helped him breakdown what the topic was by going through the journalist method question by question. By the end of the session, he had figured out his topic and he had a clearer idea of what he wanted to talk about and how to address it through his research paper.
If anything, this process showed me that sometimes verbally working through what we’re thinking about and sharing ideas with others can help us figure out what it is we’re trying to say, how we want to say it, and how others’ perspectives can help us pinpoint the exact argument we’re making. Talking allows us to slow down and think about what we’re saying before we say it, or, like in the case of my students, allowing them to go on about what’s on their mind without interruption can help them go down different mental rabbit holes where they’ll get inspired by something they thought of, or having me ask them questions every now and then can help them realize that what they’ve just expressed could be a potential research topic that yields lots of results. The journalist method also allows for casual conversation, which makes for an easier brainstorming session than simply hammering the student with formal questions or prompts they might not know how to answer.