The Tutoring Book - California State University, Sacramento
The Tutoring Book - California State University, Sacramento
The Tutoring Book - California State University, Sacramento
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not know what they are doing that makes their paper strong or effective. So as I read through what my<br />
students are doing, I can show them what they are doing. For instance, I might say, "You are analyzing<br />
here, you are providing evidence here...etc." This way, students can begin to identify for themselves the<br />
process each paper must go through and whether or not they are completing that process.<br />
Another instance when it is appropriate to be more instructive with a tutee is when the tutee has<br />
obviously not acquired basic strategies most of their classmates already have obtained at that point in their<br />
academic career. Offering solutions to this problem can be very tricky because it is a well-known fact that<br />
not everyone learns the same. Some tutees are visual, some are auditory learners, while others are<br />
kinesthetic learners. Some tutees have to write notes down while others cannot write and listen at the<br />
same time (like me). If a tutee does not know his or her learning style, I just offer key strategies that seem<br />
to work for most of my tutees. Strategies that may be helpful to students (despite whether or not the<br />
strategies are obvious to us) are:<br />
• Create a checklist of what the prompt asks students to do and check each item off as they are<br />
completed<br />
• Underline any section of the prompt the student may not understand so that they can ask their<br />
teacher (or their tutor) to clarify for them<br />
• Ask students to break their body paragraphs into three basic parts--topic sentence, evidence, and<br />
analysis--and ask them if it all connects together<br />
• Or ask them to make a basic outline of the paper in general which includes the thesis statement,<br />
the main points or the topic sentences, and the evidence they plan to support it with.<br />
As I go along I hear new strategies offered to me by fellow tutors and even tutees. Sharing strategies can<br />
be helpful, and it allows the student to keep his or her voice intact in the paper.<br />
<strong>The</strong> Non-Direct Approach<br />
Having a non-direct approach is one of the most difficult things I have had to learn as a tutor. Since I like<br />
to combine both approaches in my tutoring sessions, I have to constantly be prepared to pull back and let<br />
the student take control or step in when the student needs explicit direction. An appropriate time to be<br />
non-direct is also related to time. If you know that you will be seeing your tutee again because they have<br />
committed to meeting on a regularly scheduled time, there is not as much pressure to point out all the<br />
subtleties of academic conventions in one session. However, the reason why taking a non-direct approach<br />
can be difficult, is that the tutor has to know what questions to ask that will allow the student the freedom<br />
to answer without suspecting there already is an answer. We don't want our tutees playing a guessing<br />
game because they suspect we already know the one and only answer.<br />
A good way to approach a non-direct situation would be to ask questions that you really don't<br />
know the answers to. I asked one of my tutees about a topic I had virtually no previous knowledge of: a<br />
bacterium with a very long name. She opened up right away, often forgetting about the paper (which is<br />
great, because then they are not tied down to what they have already written). By the end of her<br />
explanation to my question, she had generated a large of amount of material relevant to her thesis<br />
statement. But the funny thing was, none of what she told me had been included in her paper! Sometimes<br />
getting the students to just talk about their paper without pressuring them to come up with a thesis<br />
statement beforehand allows them to open up with what they already know, and as a tutor, I am able to<br />
identify points my tutee makes that could be a great source of discussion in her paper.<br />
Sometimes just having the student summarize their introduction and recite their thesis (without<br />
looking at the paper) to me is just as effective in getting them to open up about their topic, because as<br />
soon as they mention their thesis, students will want to talk about what they said to support it. I had a<br />
student recite his thesis about whether or not the death penalty should be legal, and as soon as he finished<br />
explaining his thesis he began talking about all the reasons why it should be legal (I think it was after I<br />
asked him "why"--another good question to just keep asking). But like the previous tutee, much of what<br />
he told me was not included in the actual paper. So now the problem he had before of trying to make his<br />
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