Thinking about my experiences so far
with helping students revise their work in relation to the two texts
assigned this week, I feel like there is a lot of room for important.
The first text, “The Tutoring Process” by Gillespie and Lerner,
brings up the issue of prioritizing what the tutor focuses on. They
write, “Being patient and listening to the entire paper [is
important], since it's easy to get hung up on an early section when
the real challenge might come later” (24). My biggest issue is
forgetting to read through the entire paper. I'll start reading and
stop to comment while in actuality, I should be reading it through
the paper once or twice and then addressing the biggest concerns I
have. By stopping to nitpick, I kind of prevent myself from getting a
general feel for the essay and I think my comments really accumulate
which may be overwhelming for the student. That being said, a lot of
my comments are simply questions to get the student thinking which is
what Gillespie and Lerner recommend. They write, “You need to
respect writers' need to discover – with your help – the
information they need to clarify a point or expand an argument”
(25). That is definitely something I think I'm doing well – asking
questions, asking students to clarify what they mean at certain
points, and asking students to expand on certain thoughts in their
essays that I feel would benefit the overall argument. That being
said, this article was more so directed at face-to-face tutoring
while we are restricted to an online classroom. Tutoring online seems
much more difficult than it is in real life as the back and forth is
kind of stilted due to time constraints/availability.
I found myself agreeing with Racine and
Breuch's article “Developing Sound Tutor Training for
Online Writing Centers: Creating Productive Peer Reviewers." One point that really stuck out to me was
the idea that online tutoring requires both the writer and the tutor
to perfect their writing, which is something I never thought about
before. Thinking about my own experience, I did spend a lot of time
on my own word choice and I was careful when articulating my thoughts
which I probably wouldn't have put much thought into if it was
face-to-face since my words would have been paired with other social
cues; I wouldn't have to worry about the student taking what I’m
saying the wrong way. The struggle between being too professional and
coming off as cold and being too relaxed and not being taken
seriously is something I am struggling with. While writing feedback,
I do take on a very technical and professional tone and I realize
that may be dull and condescending for a student to read. I try to
balance it out by praising them when they write an excellent passage
or perfectly place a quote, but it is something I need to continue to
work on. Like Racine and Breuch suggest, I made end comments on all
of the papers which is where I took the opportunity to further praise
and emphasize the strong points, as well as go over the high concern
areas. My other comments were placed off to the side; they weren't
front comments or intertextual because I feel like that would be
distracting. It is definitely a personal preference but using
googledocs, I like to just use the comment feature so I don't feel
like I'm barging into a students work and imposing my revisions and
suggestions onto them.
An interesting blog I found this week entitled Artichoke posted a thought-provoking article called Pedagogical Promiscuity and "Assessment for Learning." It made me think about my own assessment of students and their writing -- it's worth taking a look at.
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