Tutoring Reflections Adrienne Salinas Reflection #2: Observing The tutoring session I observed was an interesting experience.

The student had never come in before, so it was a new experience for him. He was looking to go over an article summary review with the tutor. At first, he seemed nervous, but the writing fellow established nice rapport. By giving a friendly greeting and chit-chatting and laughing, she easily put the student at ease, before diving into the paper portion. The tutor asked the student what the assignment was and what he wanted to accomplish from the session. All of these things nicely followed the model of a typical tutoring session that I learned in class. From there, the tutor read the paper aloud for the student and had the student write on his paper to fix any errors. When she came across an error or something that did not sound right, she guided the student to something that would sound better. She helped the student with the clarification of a few sentences. For example, the student wrote a sentence where the tutor questioned whether there was only one ownerwhich was not the case. The way the student phrased the statement was unclear, so she helped the student to revise the sentence to have better clarity. There were also several cases of verb tense shift, so she would pause her reading in order for the student to pick up that there was an error in the sentence. The tutor was very encouraging and helpful, and overall, the experience was positive for all. Reflection #3: Observing The third time observing in the Writing Center was pretty different than my previous experiences. The student came in with specific questions about APA formatting. She wanted help with the in-text citations. The tutor was very helpful with this and showed the student the

Perdue OWL website. The tutor went through and helped the student with specific examples, while also allowing the student to try it out on her own as well. I thought this was a very helpful way of helping the student, since she guided the student to better understand the formatting of the APA style. The tutor also helped with block quoting because one of the quotes the student used in her paper was too long to just integrate into the paper. While the tutor mainly focused on the APA portion of the paper, she also helped the student with some minor LOCs. The tutor suggested that the student change one sentence from saying the study wanted to the study intended in order to better match academic writing and to have better clarity. The tutor did well with giving positive feedback throughout the paper, along with tips and suggestions on how to make the paper even better. The HOCs were definitely the APA issues but was resolved successfully by the end of the session. Overall I found the experience to be very beneficial to the student, by not only helping her improve her paper but also her APA skills. Reflection #5: Being the Tutor Going into the tutoring session, I was pretty nervous and worried if I would be able to help the student adequately. When I went into the Writing Center, I introduced myself to the experienced tutor, since I had not worked with her previously and waited for the student to arrive. The student arrived a few minutes late, but I kept up the friendly rapport and asked the student where she would like to sit. We sat at the table right by the door, side by side with the tutor sitting slightly behind us. Once I got the session going, my nerves went away, and I became more at ease with the student. The student was very out-going, so it was easy to help and converse with her.

This experience was different because the piece of writing she brought in was a creative writing piece that she just wanted to go over to see if her grammar was correct and if she included enough imagery and descriptive elements. Since her piece did not have any instructions besides having to be creative fiction story and a certain page number, it was a pretty open-ended assignment. Going over creative writing and judging it can be pretty difficult from a tutor's point of view. You do not want to judge or try to dramatically change the piece but instead, try to help the student improve the piece, by giving feedback and suggestions. Since you do not want to greatly influence a student's creative work, I asked the student guiding questions to lead the student to expand on the expository details and to include more in depth descriptions. The piece was pretty long, so it was not possible to read the entire thing in just the thirty minute session. I asked the student to go to a part where she thought could use the most attention and feedback. The section she went to had several descriptive elements but could be expanded upon. For example, one part the student wrote about a girl being grabbed at by strangers and taken against her will. It was well-written, but I could not entirely feel the characters emotions. So I asked the student, how would you feel in her position? This helped spark some great details that she wrote down and continued to take notes as we kept going along. A few sections I read aloud, and I would pause if something did not sound right. The student would notice my pause and realize the mistake right away. I also helped the student with some LOCs, such as adding missing commas. She understood the comma rules but just forgot to always add them. I made sure to give positive feedback along the way, which was easy because the piece was very well-written and entertaining. The student is an ESL student, so her grammar was a little off and awkward at times. It was not as bad as it could have been, but I definitely could see some instances where she made a careless mistake because of the language difference.

I ran most of the session, and the tutor kept relatively quiet as we went over the student's piece. Overall, the session was a success and a great experience for me. The student, also, left feeling confident with many additional ideas to add to her story. The experience definitely made me more comfortable with the idea of becoming a tutor and made me realize how important the collaboration, through the tutoring sessions, is a very helpful part of the writing process, if given the opportunity.