Throughout my experience in the writing center I have acquired and applied valuable tutoring techniques and strategies to enhanced a student’s writing. I have gained the ability to break cultural communication barriers and use strategies to help the writer develop his or her ideas. Strategies such as Nutshelling and Teaching, Mapping, and Just talk about it. With these tools I have given the students the writing confidence they had lacked before the session; while building my own confidence in the ability to effectively apply what I learned in the classroom and observations.
My first session was with a student named Paula. When I was introduced to Paula I was confident and cheerful creating a tone and body language that represented we were going to get the job done. She was eager to get to the bottom of what her professor said was wrong with her paper. She confusingly and somewhat franticly began telling me how she didn’t understand what was wrong with her paper. I took a teacher centered approach and reassured her that we were going to discover and solve the issue. I asked for Paula to take out her paper and task. We began reading. She had LOCs with tense and grammar because English was her second language but we were able to get through the paper. I discovered the major issue in the first paragraph, which was the absence of her thesis. I told Paula that she had great supportive paragraphs but there was no thesis to reflect her claims. So I called upon the resources that I had learned all semester.
First I used Just talk about it, so she can think about the focus of her paper. I followed that strategy up with Nutshelling and Teaching to “ask her to orally explain the essence of the piece while I took notes” (McAndrews and Reigstad .43). This allowed me to take the existing ideas in her paragraphs and things she hadn’t stated yet to create a working thesis. Once we had her thesis we had to polish and redirect her existing paragraphs towards it. We redirected her work by Mapping. I didn’t want the language barrier to become barrier in our session so I created a graph in an essay outline format to more easily explain structure in a visual comprehensive way. With the completion of the outline Paula regained the hope and confidence in her ability to put together her ideas on paper as an essay and showed what I had learned this semester.
When Paula had seen that I would be her tutor again she got excited to show me how she applied what she had learned to this paper. We read the paper together aloud and she had some structural tweaks to be made as far as paragraph placement to make her paper flow better, but for the most part she had made extreme progress in regards to structure. Because of the progress she made I had even changed form teacher centered to student centered tutoring “encouraging her to do most of the talking and most of the work” (McAndrews and Reigstad .25). After the session she had thanked me and said, “because I learned how to structure, the time I spend figuring out where I’m going with the paper I can spend with my kids.”
My third session was with a student named Carlos. He said that he wanted me to look over his paper with the expectation of me proof read for LOCs. In class I learned that when a student is asking for the tutor to look over the LOCs the tutor should look over the HOCs. Following what I learned in class I took the teacher centered approach and had Carlos read his paper aloud. He looked at me confident as if he made no errors. As he was reading the student came across a major HOC, which was an absents of a clear thesis. As the student kept reading there were paragraphs with too many ideas in them that needed to be broken down into two paragraphs. After he read the paper he was confident in his work unaware of the major mistakes that he had made. I explained the mistakes to him and he was surprised. He said, “WOW and I would have turned the paper in tomorrow thinking it was fine. Good thing I came to the writing center.” Like a previous student I had, his paragraphs were great but they were just great paragraphs not supportive paragraphs to back up a thesis, because there was no clear thesis. I implemented what I used in my previous session and took the topic sentences form the existing paragraphs and morphed it to answer the topic creating a working thesis.
His thesis was, “What would the world be without Fast Food? Without fast food the world would be a healthier place?” We changed it to, “In a world without fast food children would learn how to make healthier choices reducing the risk of obesity and disease as youth transition into adulthood.” After creating a thesis we went to work on his paragraphs. We had to figure out which ideas needed to stay and which ideas could stand independently as a new paragraph. In this process we discovered that he was missing an answer to one of the questions in his task. I simply suggested him to add another paragraph before his conclusion. Carlos’ conclusion was too short and didn’t exemplify the full circle effect his paper should’ve taken. I suggested him to sum up the main ideas in his paper and write a couple sentences as a solution.
Taking this course has given me a sense of pride that I have never achieved in any other course in my academic carrier. Lots of students in this college face many challenges outside of school, some are cultural and some are environmental. They are raised and are from communities that have school systems that fail them
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