In college, I never went to a writing center and never discussed my writing with anyone except my professors, so the tutoring session was a new experience for me. Surprisingly, I looked forward to receiving feedback on my work. My paper was longer than the requirements for the assignment, and I knew I needed help scaling back a bit. I expressed this to my tutor and she helped me condense the essay. First, she had me state the central idea of the entire work. Then, she asked me to restate the main idea of my first "response" paragraph. She then asked me to restate the support in only 3 sentences. After seeing that I could do this, I realized that my original version had been needlessly wordy and descriptive. We repeated the process for my second response paragraph, and I realized that that too could be condensed. Lastly, my tutor read my piece aloud to me, which gave me a chance to hear some awkward phrasing and instances of inauthentic voice.
What surprised me the most was how uncomfortable I was being the tutor. As a teacher, I'm constantly giving students feedback on their work, but so I thought I'd be at home with aiding a classmate. But I was wrong. I felt like I didn't know where to begin. I tried to start by asking my classmate to read her work aloud, but she seemed reluctant. What she did instead was summarize the points in her essay and ask for feedback. She was unsure as to whether she had sufficient examples to ground her ideas. I read parts of the essay and told her that I did see examples in her paragraphs. I asked her example to me verbally and she was able to do that. I suggested that perhaps she could include her explanation in her essay.
I think I was uncomfortable because I was never sure if I was offering enough help. I did not want to take over the session, but I did want to offer useful feedback. I also felt that my classmate was relunctant to share and I didn't know how to help her overcome her initial shyness.
I can see how the strategies that McAndrew and Reigstad suggest can be helpful. I even know that I will use some of them in my high school classes. But it was hard for me to know which strategy would be most helpful during the tutoring session. I was so nervous that I didn't know where to begin. I will have to get over my insecurity as a tutor before I'm able to implement the strategies fully.
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Blog 3: My Writing Center Philosophy
A writing center should be grounded on the principle of empowering its student writers. A cornerstone of the writing center should be the belief that students learn best when they take charge of their learning. It should be a place where students know they are expected to actively participate and where they feel their insights are respected. It should be a place where students become stronger writers who grow into possessing more confidence about their abilities. At the writing center, students should develop and learn strategies that they can use beyond a specific assignment they may be working on at the writing center.
A writing center should be grounded on the recognition that students are diverse- with different modes of thinking, perspectives, experiences, language "dialects", and skill sets. A writing center should be grounded in respect for this diversity.
A writing center is dynamic. It should be a place where everyone (student/tutor/director) is engaged in deepening his/her understanding, where ideas are traded back and forth, rejected, accepted, altered, expanded, flipped upside down, reworked, and rewritten by both tutor and student. It should have computers, reference materials, and other objects that project the idea that the writing center is a place of serious learning and ready discovery.
A writing center should be a place of open dialogue, where the director holds frequent meetings with tutors to discuss the "highs" and "lows" of the work, to offer support and suggestions to one another, and to work to improve the experience for the students. It should also be a place where student feedback is frequently sought and just as frequently put to use.
A writing center should be grounded on the recognition that students are diverse- with different modes of thinking, perspectives, experiences, language "dialects", and skill sets. A writing center should be grounded in respect for this diversity.
A writing center is dynamic. It should be a place where everyone (student/tutor/director) is engaged in deepening his/her understanding, where ideas are traded back and forth, rejected, accepted, altered, expanded, flipped upside down, reworked, and rewritten by both tutor and student. It should have computers, reference materials, and other objects that project the idea that the writing center is a place of serious learning and ready discovery.
A writing center should be a place of open dialogue, where the director holds frequent meetings with tutors to discuss the "highs" and "lows" of the work, to offer support and suggestions to one another, and to work to improve the experience for the students. It should also be a place where student feedback is frequently sought and just as frequently put to use.
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Blog 2: Lunsford's main points
In "Collaboration, Control, and the Idea of a Writing Center", Andrea Lunsford promotes a particular type of writing center, one she refers to as the Burkean Parlor Center. In this type of writing center, the group works together to identify and to solve problems. The authority is shared amongst the members in the groups and control continually shifts within the group. Lunsford opposes the Burkean Parlor Center to two other types of models for writing centers, namely the Storehouse center and the Garret center. She argues that in the Storehouse model, knowledge is seen as exterior, as resting outside the student and within the teacher. Within this model, it is the teacher who hands "knowledge" (skills and strategies for writing) to the student. It is the teacher who has control. Conversely, the Garret center is student centered. In this model, the student has the wealth of knowledge and it is up to the writing center staff to help elicit from the student her inner voice. Both the Storehouse and Garret centers are focused on the individual, albeit different individuals.
Lunsford promotes the Brukean Parlor Center as the optimal model, for she says that this model serves democracy. This model requires both tutor and student to ask questions, to think critically about problems that arise, to work together, to acknowledge another's point of view, to form consensus, and even to agree to disagree at times (all skills, she adds, that are necessary for the "real world"). She asserts that practicing the collaboration that the Burkean model promotes in a subversive act, for it upsets the prevailing authoritarian view of education that contends that control must lie with someone, with an individual. She even cites examples of instances when collaborative learning was undervalued and dismissed.
Even though she contends that the collaborative model is the best for writing centers, Lunsford maintains that collaboration must be entered into cautiously, for she cites that collaborative work can go off course and become something entirely different, such as busy work for some participants or student/teacher centered learning environments. To prevent this from happening, Lunsford says that groups need to continually monitor themselves as well as develop a theory on which their work can be based.
Lunsford promotes the Brukean Parlor Center as the optimal model, for she says that this model serves democracy. This model requires both tutor and student to ask questions, to think critically about problems that arise, to work together, to acknowledge another's point of view, to form consensus, and even to agree to disagree at times (all skills, she adds, that are necessary for the "real world"). She asserts that practicing the collaboration that the Burkean model promotes in a subversive act, for it upsets the prevailing authoritarian view of education that contends that control must lie with someone, with an individual. She even cites examples of instances when collaborative learning was undervalued and dismissed.
Even though she contends that the collaborative model is the best for writing centers, Lunsford maintains that collaboration must be entered into cautiously, for she cites that collaborative work can go off course and become something entirely different, such as busy work for some participants or student/teacher centered learning environments. To prevent this from happening, Lunsford says that groups need to continually monitor themselves as well as develop a theory on which their work can be based.
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Blog 1: The work of a writing center
The work that happens in a writing center should be student-focused. It requires that tutors check their egos and focus on helping the student writer develop and practice methods that will help them grow as writers. Checking our egos requires tutors to recognize that the session is not an opportunity for them to show off their "superior" knowledge of writing. This means that tutors should avoid leading the session by placing their own thoughts, experiences, or writing preferences onto the student- writer's page. This means that tutors should not harp on apparent errors in organization, thoroughness, or fluency. Tutors need to prompt the writers with questions and statements that will encourage the writer to explore any number of areas-the range of topics from which they could pick, their feelings/knowledge about a topic, their purpose for writing a piece, the techniques that might work best for a piece, the organization of the piece, etc. The session is about helping students develop thinking processes that will help them, not only in the one session, but with future writing endeavors as well. For example, during revision, a tutor might discuss with the tutor the implications of possibly starting from or ending the essay at a different point. This one question can lead to several possibilities for revision (each with its own impact that can be discuseed). This is more effective than the tutor simply telling the student how/what to revise. It requires the student to think about the decisions he/she is making in their writing, to ponder the implications of those decisions, and to choose the best to suit their specific goals. This requires the student to actively think about her work and is a way of thinking that he/she can apply to future writing endeavors.
Monday, September 14, 2009
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