The Tutoring Book - California State University, Sacramento

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