Letter to Bert Eisenstadt-Evaluation of tutoring in the
Writing Center
Dear
Mr Bert Eisenstadt:
My name is__ and major is in Early Childhood
Education. I am currently taking Seminar
in Teaching Writing, which is instructed by Dr. Justin Rogers-Cooper. I earned a bachelor degree in Accounting at Queens
College back in 2008 and am returning for a second profession in Education. I am fascinated by the magnitude of teaching
techniques and knowledge I have been exploring in duration, in addition to the
hands on experience on the real world tutoring experience that Dr.
Rogers-Cooper has been coordinating with other professors’ freshman classes. At this point of the semester, our class has
taken all four required tutoring observation sessions in the Writing Center, as
well as a group tutoring session for the entry level students in ENG 101, and
one tutoring session for pre-college writing in ENG 099. It is encouraging to learn that we will soon be
revisiting the first group of students tutored in ENG 101. These sessions
have been a great success in learning and carrying on the important role as a
tutor in assisting fellow students, who are eager to take on their first year of
college. After many tutoring and observation
sessions, I observed that LaGuardia has a very diverse student body, with a
wide range of age, as well as a variety of writing needs. There is no magic tool
as One Size Fits All tutoring strategy.
That actually makes the course materials, Active Voice by James Moffett, and Tutoring Writing by Donald A. Mc Andrew and Thomas J. Reigstad
valuable. These materials cover and
summarize different theories and strategies underpinning tutoring writings. I found Social Constructionism and
Collaborative Learning to be very practical in tutoring different age group
students, amongst other theories. I also found that the writer’s block issue
brought up by Mike Rose in “Rigid Rules, Inflexible Plans, and the stifling of
Language: A Cognitivist Analysis of Writer’s Block” have deepened my sense on
the composing process and how to implement a writer profile system which may
contribute to the student’s success.
I was very impressed with my second observation session. This was a joint session with one tutee and
two tutoring observers (including myself).
All three students were in the same class and had the same assignment, a
writing using the form of dialogue. The
tutee had the final draft ready for discussion.
The tutor initialed the tutoring session with the technique of Role-play
and Read aloud after he identified there were four roles in the Dialogue draft. The tutor had found some issues in the
Dialogue after completing read aloud through role-playing. Instead of jumping to fix the problems, he
challenged the tutee and the rest of us as to how we thought about the
Dialogue. We all, including the tutee,
agreed that there were overwhelming statistics in the body of the
Dialogue. These statistics are very
informative, but hardly engaging in oral conversation in this precise way. It did not take long before the tutor
addressed this problem as well as the tutee becoming aware of it. The tutoring session started with great
success. As pointed out in Tutoring Writing, “this kind of
role-playing often helps the writer discover the appropriate level of
formality” (Mc Andrew & Reigstad 55).
Although the statistics support the context of Dialogue, which required
being researchable, it does not fit it in the body of Dialogue. The tutee incorporated the statistics into
footnotes in her final submission. Furthermore,
the tutor found the piece may have had inappropriate voice or tone. The tone like “Affirmative” did not fit in
the Dialogue, which is employed in casual conversations. It looked less likely to be heard in oral
exchange. The tutor then unitized the
Voice/Tone Tutorial strategy and reminded the tutee to “focus concern of
writer’s audience and purpose for the piece” (Mc Andrew & Reigstad 55). The tutee quickly envisioned her position as
an audience then agreed upon the tutor’s clarification that, “the Casual voice
is the level for friends and insiders” (Mc Andrew & Reigstad 55). She took the advice and thus toned down “Affirmative”
into “I agree”. I truly admired the
tutor, who adopted the Collaborative Learning Theory (Gere 1987) to underpinning
this tutoring session. I found this method very efficient in the tutoring
session, especially in dealing with a mature student. Since older students, as in this tutoring
session, have more life and work experience, the tutor is able to “challenge
one another with questions, use the evidence and information available to them,
develop relationships among issues, and evaluate their thinking” (Gere 1987).
In contrast, at my first observing session, the tutee
was a young adult. The tutee found the
assignment challenging and got struck on some technique terms that were
unfamiliar to him. To my surprise, the
tutee was in his third year of study at LaGuardia and struggled to complete his
entry level assignment in ENG 101. After
the tutor initiated the discussion on his assignment, he quickly came to a conclusion
that the tutee needed help in reading, not writing. He got on the phone to get the contact
information of the Reading Center and referred the tutee for a visit
there. The tutor also gave the tutee a
short lesson regarding the structure of the writing format, as well as tips on
how to read efficiently wrapping up the short tutoring session. As to my surprise again, I now have to
overturn my positive comments on this first session observed that I had posted
on the class blog at the beginning of the semester. Now I felt pity that the student in need left
the Writing Center with empty hands. I think the tutee may have experienced
difficulty, so called writer’s block. Mike Rose, who had conducted a
cognitivist analysis of writer’s block, described writer’s block as
“frustrating, self-defeating inability to generate the next line, the right
phrase, the sentence that will release the flow of words once again”. Ever since in primary school, students have been
taught to follow certain rules in writings like wordings and vocabulary
selections, grammar correctness, sounds structure, then advance to a higher
level, we learn how to interpret our thought through thesis, claim, analysis, evidence,
and lay out a logical plan in organization, and conclusion and so on. To a certain degree, our heads are filled
with rigid rules and plans unconsciously that affects the flow of writing. Nonetheless, it is by no means to imply that we
should be free from all rules or plans.
Rose’s study revealed that the problem is not the rule itself but the
way blocker follows it for absolutes, as if they were algorithms (Mathematic
rules) and does not allow a flexible or an alternative in play. For instance, I
myself am surely one of the many. I would spend days to compose a four page
essay, while other classmates can complete it in a few hours. I would tear the whole essay when I found a
new thread that may serve the essay better, a dysfunctional problem-solving
procedure as Rose pointed out, “…behavior is governed by an explicitly learned
or inferred rule: “Always try to “psych out” a professor” (Rose 396) in order
to score high, and thus have to rewrite it from scrap until I got tired of
reading it. This ended up adversely
affecting my timely submission. Furthermore,
Rose found that “blocking usually resulted in rushed, often late papers and
resultant grades that did not truly reflect these students’ writing ability”
(Rose 389). Although it is not uncommon
that writers experience writer’s block, this may eventually have a negative
effect on the writer’s self-esteem in terms of their writing ability, as well
as willingness toward the compositing process.
In fact, I feel better now to learn that I am not the only one who
experience writer’s block. Rose
concludes his study by recommending teachers or tutors build a writing profile
together with students. This can help to
track down the students’ writing history and thus better serve their
needs. The items should be included in writer’s
profile like the student’s major, how the student defines “good” writing? What
kind of the writing did the student do in high school? What kind of rule did
the student use in composition? Etc. This information is valuable to understand
the students’ composing process and learn what kind of rigid rule or inflexible
plan that may lie at the base of the student’s composing process. This can make an immediate remedy possible. Students actually can be trained to select,
to “know which rules are appropriate for which problems…dysfunctional rules are
easily replaced with or counter-balanced by functional ones…” (Ross 400).
Each college
has its own unique student body and dynamic. LaGuardia has a good amount of
students that are freshly graduated from high school, as well as mature
students who return to complete their degrees, seeking for a second profession
or fulfilling the continue professional education. Generally speaking, the mature students have
more work and life experience, and thus focus better towards their academic
goals. In fact, the writing center has
great resources to cover the needs of these groups of students. On the other hand, many students at LaGuardia
are the first members of their families receiving a college education. In some cases, some high school students
graduated and advanced to college due to parental and societal pressure. According to Moffett, “Composing words on
paper is composing the mind” (Moffett 14). Due to the limitations of these young
student’s life experience and lack of working experience, most freshman face
challenges in “composing their mind” and thus find it a challenge to meet the
expectation of college level writing.
That being said, the Writing Center is very essential to their
success. According to Lev Vygotsky,
“students have an “actual developmental level” and a “level of potential
development” at which they could work if they had the help of a teacher or an
able peer coaching them to move beyond what they can currently do” (Vygotsky). If the writing center could overcome the
challenged of implementing a writer’s profile system, the great reward of
students success for generations to come is in the foreseeable future. With the scaffolding of the writing center, students should
be able to avoid exhausting their grant or scholarships in entry level writing classes
like the student in my first observation session, and thus get a better chance towards
graduation.
Thank you in
advance for your time and interest in my suggestion. It will be very exciting to see a writer
profile system be implemented in a foreseeable future.
Respectfully
yours,
Moffett, James. Active Voice, a writing program across the
curriculum. New Hampshire: Boynton/Cook, 1992. Print
Mc Andrew &
Reigstad. Tutoring Writing, a practical guide for conferences. New Hampshire: Boynton/Cook, 2001. Print
Rose, Mike. “Rigid Rules, Inflexible Plan, and the
Stifling of Language: A Cognitivist Analysis of Writer’s Block.” College Composition and Communication. National
Council of Teachers of English. 1980.
Web. 13 Jan. 2008.
http://links.jstor.org/sici?xici=0010096X%28198012%2931%3A4%3C389%ARRIPAT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-L
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