Colin and I started off our session today by discussing last week's mentor meeting a bit. He found it helpful and interesting to get so much input from everyone else on things we've been discussing for the past few weeks. Today we talked a little about Colin's sessions with his weekly student, which are going well.
He asked about how my sessions have been and it segued into a sort of discussion about what methods we think work best for what students, as well as our strengths and weaknesses as both writers and tutors. We shared some little hints that we often give our students and things we do to tailor our tutoring style depending on the student. The example I gave was a weekly of mine who has a lot of trouble with organization and staying on topic. We discussed things I already do in our sessions to help him teach himself organization in his writing (like making a backwards outline, which is something I do with a lot of drop-ins as well that really seems to be helpful), and Colin gave me some suggestions as well. We also discussed the sort of "stigma" associated with seeing a tutor, and why so many students seem reluctant to ask for help with their writing.
After a while, our conversation started to run out of steam so we just chatted for a bit until his weekly student showed up.
Coco,
ReplyDeleteYour discussion with Colin regarding tutoring methods was great mentoring. This is the sort of thing that mentors do on a consistent basis with their mentees. Here the importance of your mentorship comes into play because you are advocating best practices and helping Colin to apply these in his sessions. Nice Work!
Steve
Coco,
ReplyDeleteI like the fact that you and Colin are sharing examples from your own sessions and exhanging ways to tailor sessions to help the writer. I think that was what the Mentor/Mentee meeting was really focusing on - how to be flexible for your writers and how to assess the diferent ways in which students need assistance. Setting the students' improvement as the main goal is what we all should be doing and this practice of organizing different ways to help them is really helpful. I think that expanding upon your discussion with Colin and putting forward your session tips would be another great post!
-Brian