One-on-One Reflections

Working with students has always been a goal of mine and small group settings or one-on-one experiences has facilitated such rewarding experiences in my life.  Besides tutoring my own middle school-level students after school for three years and helping elementary students with their homework for an after school program, last semester I worked at the ETC center with two different students. The different settings created very different results in my feelings as an “instructor”, “student”, and the combination of both. As my goals begin to shift towards teaching college, this last semester’s interactions with two students was incredibly helpful.

First, it was interesting to find that my two students had similar writing concerns. They both had trouble organizing and developing their ideas. They both had strong grammar/mechanical skills and their voices, when not muddled by disorganization, were authentic. However, my students significantly differed in their approach to these tutoring sessions. Student A was reserved, but invested in participating in tutoring. He seemed to want to make the best use of his time, even if he did lack confidence in his own writing ability. Student B was much more confident about himself, but less inclined to participate in the process. Showing up to tutoring late, Student B would almost never show up with writing assignments to go over.

Ironically, it was Student B who expressed the most positive feedback about the tutoring experience at the end of the semester. In comments he made to me, he found a lot of help with his writing. Meanwhile, Student A remained reserved and I do not know what my influence to his writing or life may have been. I do believe that in some way I helped both students, but unlike tutoring students I was currently teaching, I am not sure how far we extended that learning, although I was pleased with what I saw as progress in the writing of both my students. There was, however, an issue of resolution that is still something I struggle with. Without any other feedback, it can be hard to evaluate your own personal challenges and successes as the tutor.

The readings did help me to work through some of these feelings by highlighting and rationalizing some of the purposes of tutoring. I was happy to see that some of my own values were supported by the research. The Harris article, “Tutoring ESL Students: Issues and Options” provided a lot of tips to use with any tutoring situation, not just ESL concerns. Concentrating on only “one or two concerns”, explaining to students “what has been done well”, and prioritizing “global errors” were some guidelines I used in my own tutoring. Then, like Destandau’s article, “Promoting Generation 1.5 Learners’ Academic Literacy and Autonomy: Contributions from the Learning Center” I made it my practice to begin each session (after the hellos and rapport building) and end each session with asking students what questions or concerns they had.

Unfortunately, both the students I tutored last had difficulty directing the sessions. This made reading “Examining Our Lore: A Survey of Students’ and Tutors’ Satisfaction with Writing Center Conferences” by Thompson, et al. especially useful to read. I understand the difficulty we beginning tutors have with directing in the sessions. We want to use the information we learned from this program to guide us as educators with student-directed education. However, sometimes students need to feel comfortable with the process and with us, before we just completely let go of control. Not to say that I think we should disregard nondirective actions, but we need to be more reflective on time and place.