The Tutoring Book - California State University, Sacramento

After each paragraph I asked her to explain to me what the text was saying about the case. When
she finished I advised her to write it in the book next to that specific paragraph. At the end of each
section, I had her create a summary based on the notes she took. Though we were only able to make it
through two of the five sections she needed to get done, she felt completely confident that she could now
do the process on her own.
In this example, Nicole was able to use the session to help the student engage with her text. By
modeling the SQ3R in a collaborative manner, Nicole negated the typical utor/tutee hierarchy by
reminding the student she was an expert in the area of legal terminology. By taking their respective roles,
Nicole and her tutee were able to remain on the same page. This session served as an educational function
for both individuals. The tutee was able to learn an effective way to read a text and summarize it and
Nicole was able to gain some trans-discourse knowledge that she will be able to use in the future.
Final Thoughts
Gillespie and Lerner note, that students who come to the Writing Center are responding to some
kind of reading either to "simply make sense of what they are reading" or to "analyze [and] evaluate"
(105). Given this, reading becomes fundamental to the writing process. If a student cannot critically read
or summarize a document then they are less able to articulate on their own pages. Reading and writing are
"powerful instruments for learning, capable of enabling thinking, and the critical analysis of ideas"
(Tierney, Soter, O'Flahavan, and McGinley, 136). If one is better able to read, it follows that they are
better able to critically analyze, which will lead to a more enriched analysis of their texts rather than one
that simply scratches the surface of an idea.
Writing Center tutors can help their tutees negotiate the text by modeling close reading when
appropriate. When we ask our tutees to define what they mean it often pushes them to the limits of their
cognitive ability. In order to survive such the cognitive overload that academic writing demands, the
SQ3R can be a useful way for your writers to work with a text they are writing about, regardless of
discipline. Caveat: Try to introduce the "SQ3R" without using the actual acronym, as it has been our
experience that "SQ3R" causes immediate phobic algebra flashbacks in certain students and tutors. What
we hope future tutors remember from this article is that we are a writing center where writers help writers,
and that while we can employ reading strategies when needed, we should be careful not use reading as a
back door to appropriate the tutee’s text. It is still the tutee’s paper, and the informed tutor can avert
disaster in helping tutees develop their own skill set of critical reading tools as well as academic writing
skills. Just remember that "your job isn't to explain the meaning" but rather "help the writer discover that
meaning" (Gillespie and Lerner, 108).
Works Cited
Academic Senate for Community College Publications. “Academic Literacy: A Statement of
Competences Expected of Student’s Entering California’s Public Colleges and Universities.” Spring
2002. Web. http://info.asccc.org.
Gillespie, Paula, and Neal Lerner. The Allyn and Bacon Guide to Peer Tutoring. Boston: Allyn, 2000.
Print.
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