Transitioning from Tutor to Composition Teacher

I've always known I was going to go to graduate school. I also knew that I'd help pay my way through it by, hopefully, securing a teaching position and teaching Freshman composition courses. Then I stopped and thought about it, would I really be qualified? Could I ruin some poor freshman's first semester because I didn't really know what I was doing, and just pushed through teaching without any kind of skills or training?

Then at the IWCA, Kathy Hansler and Maggie Cecil hosted a workshop all about transferring the skills you develop as a Writing Center tutor into real life composition classroom pedagogy. With that hypothetical and devastated future Freshman in mind, I went.

They had us do an exercise to put us into our "tutor" mode vs. our "teacher" mode: We read two different excerpts, but while we were reading we were either a "tutor" or a "teacher". I started as a tutor. I went through the small excerpt, noticed that the sentence level problems I was seeing probably pointed to this student being ELL, but stopped their. When I wrote down some questions I'd ask, I found that they were still focused HOC, and how we could re-direct the paper on more of a global level. Then I was a teacher. Somehow, I didn't even write on the excerpt. I was quicker to jump to those sentence-level problems, and to dismiss the disorganization of the excerpt, rather than ask questions that could lead to its improvement. During our discussion I realized this was probably related to grades. In my teacher brain, all I could think about (even if it was subconsciously) was what grade I was going to give this at the end. That made the writing feel more final to me, and that if these types of errors still existed at this stage then the student wasn't putting any work in.

When I was a tutor, my mind was already framed to accept that this writing was a work in progress. With my teacher brain, it just wanted to pass judgement.

This made me look back at that rhetorical Freshman from earlier. How could I help evaluate them, while also maintaining my "work-in-progress" mentality towards the writing? One example we came up with as a workshop is to have rough drafts that get an "in progress" grade. This grade serves to show the student what they'd get on the paper if they did absolutely nothing else to it. It would also allow me as the teacher to point out some more global issues I'm noticing, and then for the students to find ways to improve upon them.