Hey all. Today was a rather good mentoring session with Tim. The first part of it was a tutorial for Inspiration 8 (at his request). He was telling me that he had a session earlier today that was a brainstorming one. Inspiration 8 was something that he had wanted to use, to get the student to really think about the assignment, but didn't feel comfortable enough to do so. He still had a "good" session. He talked about the main idea of the paper with his student for about 15 minutes before having a nice discussion about the prompt questions. Getting the student into the right frame of mind for a paper is something that we as tutors should always try to do, and that was one of the lessons that Tim went away with today.
The next lesson that we talked about was patience. I had regaled him with a session that I had right before our mentor meeting. My student is always a little bit reluctant to throw out his own ideas. When I encounter this problem with him, I always try to ask him thought-provoking questions. I won't continue with the session until he gives me a response. This means that there are awkward gaps where the session is just silent. That awkwardness is kind of an incentive for the student to respond and continue to have a conversation throughout the session. I know that we as tutors sometimes want to just tell the student to do something in a particular way when they don't want to cooperate, but it takes restraint to fight this urge. It also takes patience to get the student to do work in the session, sometimes. I believe that this is an important message to relay to our mentees because they need to learn early on how to make a difficult (define that how you will) student do work. This is also a lesson that one of the tutor training courses taught.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Alex R,--you bring up some important points that I'm sure we all know but are worth revisiting from time to time. Let me reverse the order of things here a bit by first mentioning the need for tutors to have patience. Yes, it can be very frustrating to get students to "open up" and discuss the writing; far too many believe that their writing is fine "as is" and in no need of revision. At other times, it is simply that they really have no ideas (at least at first), and that is why they rely on the tutor to generate ideas. Of course, here is where brainstorming and something like Inspiration 8 come into play. All of these things are meant to help students improve their writing and NOT absolve them from doing the actual work. Far too often students expect the tutor to do all the work meaning that goal is simply to get "the grade" so actually very little learning occurs when such a situation presents itself. Here patience comes into play quite significantly; we must never be tempted, difficult as it is, to just give away answers. NO! Keep in mind those leading questions that you should always ask. Also, the 30-second rule--wait for at least 30 seconds until your student responds. In reality this is a very short time, but during a session it can seem like an eternity. Othertimes, leaving the student alone for 10 minutes or so to make notes, outline, freewrite, or begin writing part of an essay can also generate ideas from writers themselves. Sometimes we must have even more patience than usual to actually LISTEN to what our students have to say about their writing. Yes, the balance is often difficult to acheive on the tutor's part, but in the long run benefits the student's learning through writing. Good stuff here!
ReplyDeleteSteve