Reflection on Practice for tutor training

One of the requirements of an internship in the MSUD writing center is to reflect on tutoring through a shared journal. Reflection is used as a tool to train tutors to become aware of methods, styles, writing process, and the needs of their clients. The article Tutor Training and Reflection on Practice by Jim Bell http://casebuilder.rhet.ualr.edu/wcrp/publications/wcj/wcj21.2/WCJ21.2_Bell.pdf is about the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of using reflection to change tutoring methods from tutor-centered to student-centered, to structured participation throughout a semester.

"Reflection on practice is based on the assumption that changes in thinking will lead to changes in behavior" (p.82) which is why it is so popular in fields such as teacher education. His goal, is for writing center tutors to employ the structured participation (or collaborative) method of tutoring as their first choice. What this means is the "tutor structures or manages the conference and the student does most of the writing work. The tutor establishes a framework or outline or skeleton of questions, and the student builds on or fills in or fleshes out the structure" (p 80).

In Bell's writing center, at the University of Northern British Columbia, each tutor begins with ten hours of training including instruction on tutoring methods, phases of the writing process, lower order concerns versus higher order concerns, and administration procedures. Bell encourages tutors to use structured participation (or collaboration) as their method of choice and instructs them to answer leading questions in their journals about the method they employed that day during their conferences. His questions are meant to guide tutors to think about their method of tutoring in comparison to a collaborative method.

After consulting colleagues, and recording the results of tutor training, including reflection-on-practice, in his writing center, Bell found that reflection-on-practice exercises and ten hours of training did not "seem to make major changes in tutoring". Two of the three tutors he used for this article, had identical types of conferences at the end of the semester as they did at the beginning. The third tutor changed her tutoring style from tutor-centered (tutor does most of the talking and writing) to student-centered (student runs the conference, using the tutor as a resource person), but the change was not attributed to the reflection exercises.

Bell speculated that change happens more gradually and tutoring methods can't be taught in a short period of time. Tutors can be influenced and encouraged through training and guided reflection exercises over a two to three semester period. His tutors found the reflection exercises beneficial to the program and all wanted it continue using it. I agree with his conclusion that change is gradual and reflection is a useful tool to gain insight into how one thinks about writing and tutoring.