Second Tutoring Observation

My second tutoring observation was very different from my first. This time the student came in with a complete written essay for the tutor to review. I also noticed that it was a young women in the session with all three of us and it looked like she may have been there from the previous tutoring session.

The student comes in with a full essay for the tutor to review. The tutor immediately starts to read the essay to himself in silence. The tutor then proceeds to point out grammatical errors in the students paper. I found the session to begin with a focus on lower order concerns. There was a lot of corrections of sentence structure. A few times the tutor asked what the tutor might be trying to say or get across in his paper and offered him ideas on how he might change it. I thought this reminded me of the editor journalist approach which your not supposed to do. However I did think that the tutor was very knowledgeable of the English language and how proper written English was to be written. After getting through the entire paper he told the student that it was good but that he had a lot of mechanical errors within the paper, so he gave it back to him to fix.

Now he turns to the young women and begins to read over her essay that she had written on a laptop. He leaves one student to help another. After he reads what she has written, he begins to talk to her and ask her questions about what she's writing. Also about what her main focus of the paper will be. They begin to brainstorm ideas about her topic. He instructs her to write down her ideas. This time he is focusing on higher order concerns. The essay is on a subject of something personal to the student and she begins to become very emotional about the topic. The tutor listens intently but does not fall into the trap of giving therapy. He stays professional and continues to direct the session towards the goal of writing a great paper. As this is all happening I noticed that the first student was waiting on him. The tutor became so focused on the second student that he sort of neglected the first student. The first student looked like he needed help or wanted to ask a question but he did not want to interrupt the tutor. After a long period of time he returns to helping the other student. The session ends and the first student leaves to finish correcting errors and he continues to help the young woman.

In this lesson I saw examples of many good things, as well as many things I might want to avoid doing in the future. I thought that the tutor was very knowledgeable and did a great job of addressing certain higher order concerns but I felt like he stressed to many lower order concerns as well. I also learned that helping two students at the same time can be very difficult. Its hard to balance the amount of time each student deserves. This could lead to an improper use of session time.