The Tutoring Book - California State University, Sacramento

Collaboration in the Writing Center
34
Alison Moore
Shauna Poovey
Fall 2009
The first week of tutoring at the Writing Center can be very intimidating because, when you first
start, you may feel as if there is an immense amount of pressure and responsibility on you, the tutor.
However, the same must be said for the tutee. In tutoring writing, the tutee is equally responsible for the
success of a session. This is known as collaborative tutoring.
Tutoring Writing describes how, “All learning is fundamentally collaborative, requiring two
people: one who is a member of the club and one who wants to be. They work together with trust in each
other and confidence in themselves, and learning happens incidentally to their focus on collaboration”
(5). It is not just the tutor who has responsibilities in improving writing, but the tutee as well. It is the
tutee’s job to come to each session prepared to work on an assignment. Without proper preparation, there
is little the tutor can do to assist in the learning process. This article will serve as a “How To” for
successful collaborative tutoring sessions.
Getting the Conversation Started
One thing that you may not think about when tutoring is the importance of conversation. In
Tutoring Writing the importance of simply engaging in conversation is emphasized. The text states that
social constructionism shows “that language is social, a phenomenon of societies, both created by them
and serving them” (1). When first read, this may strike a chord with you because it is both obvious and
unknown at the same time.
While it seems easy to understand that an individual’s particular social environment influences
their language, it may not be something we each think about on a daily basis. But when it comes to
tutoring writers, it is important to think about their individual backgrounds when reading their writing.
Since our language is deeply influenced by the type of social environment surrounding us, it is
important to understand that the person you are tutoring may be influenced in a different way from you.
As the text states, “We use language primarily to join communities we do not yet belong to and to cement
our membership in communities we already belong to” (2). In this sense, tutoring writing works as a
collaboration of two different people’s language to reach a common goal: successful writing.
This idea ties directly into another theory regarding tutoring writing: collaborative learning. As
mentioned before, “All learning is fundamentally collaborative, requiring two people: one who is a
member of the club and one who want to be” (5). What is most interesting is that one of these theories
directly relates to another. Our language is influenced by the social environment around us and we work
together with others toward common goals. In this particular case, the common goal is tutoring writing so
that everyone involved succeeds.
Working Together to Formulate Ideas
It is a fairly common occurrence in the Writing Center that a student will come in for help with
nothing more than a prompt. For an inexperienced tutor, this can be a frustrating situation because one
expects that a tutee will have something written to allow us to work with. It is not just the tutor who has
responsibilities in improving writing, but the tutee as well.
It is the tutee’s job to come to each session prepared to work on an assignment. Without proper
preparation, there is little the tutor can do to assist in the learning process. However, it is always possible
to collaboratively come up with ideas. For example, having the tutee do some type of free write in order
to get ideas flowing is one way of working together to formulate ideas. Tutoring Writing explains that,