Training Tutors in the Writing Center

In his article "Great and no-so-great expectations: Training faculty and student tutors", (https://writinglabnewsletter.org/archives/v25/25.9.pdf)Writing Center director Joseph Zeppetello writes about the effectiveness of shadow/mentoring training of both faculty tutors and student interns. His article also points out the diverse point-of-view and concerns of  interns in comparison to faculty.

Shadow/mentoring training is where a new tutor observes tutoring sessions for a week or two, and encouraged to contribute when they feel ready to tutor. It’s a simple method similar to how I have been trained so far this summer. Along with sitting in on sessions, intern and faculty tutors participate in weekly meetings and keep journals that are submitted for a grade at the end of the semester (for students). We haven’t had this kind of group meeting, but I keep an online journal that is shared with Liz and other interns using Evernote (www.evernote.com ).

The weekly meetings are used as training sessions. They start with a student text to be read together followed by a general discussion which might include questions like: how one might begin the tutoring session, what would your focus be, and what are the main concerns the paper?     

The discussion and answers to the above questions were quite different between student interns and faculty tutors. For example, faculty were most concerned with how to tutor rather than teach, how to connect with the student in such a short time, grammar and spelling, structure of the paper, or as Zeppetello puts it “teacherly concerns”. The intern’s main concerns were more focused on “student concerns” such as understanding the assignment and getting the best grade. They were also more concerned with “getting it right” and whether they would know the right answer or not. In general, interns were concerned with “helping the writer improve the grade”. Open-ended conversations such as this are beneficial to both the intern tutor and the faculty tutor as they consider the implications of approaching tutoring from a fresh perspective.