The first student that I worked with was the student from last session and she had gone from a page full of notes, to a full complete draft of her essay. I was quite pleased that she had accomplished so much. I asked her about her paper and what she believed she still might need help with. She said she needed help with topic sentences and transitions from one paragraph to the next. So I asked her question about what the main idea of certain paragraphs might be and that's how we began to create topic sentences. As this was happening I got another student and she also had the same issues with her paper. I began to assign task to each student while I worked with the other because this gave a balance to the session and allowed me time to think about each students paper. This worked great and I felt like I was getting this two student tutoring thing in the bag. What i did not expect was the third student that asked for my help while the other two students were working. I did not want to turn him away and I had got a lot done with the two other students so I decided to give it a shot. So I had three students at one time. Surprisingly this still worked. the third student had trouble with his conclusion and we began to discuss what his conclusion might be. I explained that usually a conclusion is a good place to put a summary or include your own reactions to the essay. He believed that he would include his own reactions to the essay so that he could express himself better.
In the end I helped all three students in one session and I was very proud of myself as well as the students because they had accomplished a lot of work in such a short time. Collaborative tutoring along with open-ended question did the trick again. This strategy always seems to come in hand and works well with many other strategies and techniques. I also learned that balance is very important in a tutoring session. If you have the right amount of balance you can even work with three students at one time.
