I’ve been a Writing Center peer tutor since my sophomore year at DePaul, and I can easily say that working here has been one of the most impactful experiences I’ve had in college. Many of the soft skills I’ve developed as a peer tutor have been applicable to work and activities I do outside of the Writing Center that seem completely unrelated to writing or tutoring, such as my work as a music major. However, I’ve also held many teaching, tutoring, and mentorship roles during my time in college, and I thought it would be interesting to compare my experiences in each of these positions with my work as a peer tutor.
Was I using the same approach to tutoring in all of these positions, or did I use different strategies and techniques for each job? Did I apply the Writing Center’s core values, beliefs, and practices in any of my non-Writing Center jobs? These were just some of the questions that I wanted to explore in my reflection.
Chicago Quarter Mentor
When I started working at the Writing Center in the fall quarter of my sophomore year, I also started working as a Chicago Quarter Mentor for the Office of New Student and Family Engagement. As a Chicago Quarter Mentor, I was assigned to the freshman course “Discover Chicago: Chicago’s Music Scene” to assist with supervising class excursions throughout the city, teach an hour of class each week about the transition from high school to college, and meet with each student one-on-one to discuss their freshman experience. I worked as a Chicago Quarter Mentor in the fall quarters for my sophomore, junior, and senior years.
When reflecting upon my experiences in this role and how it relates to my work as a Writing Center peer tutor, the first similarity that came to mind was that both positions required the ability to build rapport with new people, although this needed to occur in different ways for each role. At the Writing Center, most of my writers are people I only see for one or two appointments, so rapport is largely limited to making the student feel comfortable with sharing their work and discussing their writing. Since the time and scope of working with each student is quite limited, building enough rapport for them to feel comfortable sharing their writing with me can often be done quickly.
To contrast this, I worked with the same class of 15 to 25 students for the entirety of fall quarter as a Chicago Quarter Mentor, and because my one-on-one meetings with these students involved asking them about what they’re struggling with academically or socially, I found that a much deeper level of rapport was necessary and that this took much longer to establish.
Additionally, I noticed that the Writing Center places much emphasis on collaboration, with this being a core value, and to facilitate this, tutors are encouraged to present themselves as a peer instead of as an authority figure. This dynamic directly contrasted with the more hierarchical dynamic I had with my students as a Chicago Quarter Mentor. Given that I was helping to teach part of this class and also graded some assignments, my job as a Chicago Quarter Mentor had a very clear power dynamic and inherently called for me to be directive instead of collaborative.
I found it very interesting to reflect on the type of language I used in each setting: as a peer tutor, I often ask writers whether they agree with my suggestions or not and soften my suggestions with phrases like “maybe you can” or “you might want to,” whereas I don’t use these types of phrases as a Chicago Quarter Mentor.
I found that the more directive way of speaking that I use as a Chicago Quarter Mentor comes more naturally to me, but I think both styles of teaching reflect the nature and power dynamic of each setting. As a Chicago Quarter Mentor, I was in a clear position of power whereas as a peer tutor, my priority is to position myself as a peer and simply offer suggestions that the writer can decide to use or disregard.
Volunteer ESL Tutor
For the first half of this school year, I worked as a volunteer adult ESL tutor for the Chinese Mutual Aid association. I would meet with an adult student once a week, and we primarily focused on improving her speaking and conversational skills. The biggest difference between this position and being a peer tutor at the Writing Center was the amount of independent agenda-setting there was.
As a peer tutor, I always ask my writer if there is anything in particular they want to focus on and use their response in conjunction with the hierarchy of concerns to inform my agenda. Therefore, I feel like the amount of independence I exercise in agenda-setting is actually limited because from reading a writer’s draft and following the hierarchy of concerns, it’s often quite clear what feedback I should prioritize to make the biggest impact possible on the writer’s paper.
However, as an ESL tutor focusing primarily on speaking skills, there wasn’t an equivalent to the “draft/paper” a writer brings in to an appointment. This, combined with the fact that my student often didn’t have specific things they wanted to work on, resulted in me having to do much more independent agenda-setting work including deciding what goal or concept each session should focus on and what we would do during the session to achieve that goal.
Because I started this position after I’d been working at the Writing Center for some time, I was able to apply some strategies I’d learned at the Writing Center to my ESL tutoring. One of these strategies was limiting the amount of feedback I gave at a time to avoid overwhelming the writer and deciding on what feedback I should give based on what would be the most impactful to the writer. This usually involves following the hierarchy of concerns to choose a maximum of three agenda items at the Writing Center, but I applied these strategies to my ESL tutoring by only commenting on or correcting my student if 1) they misused the particular word or phrase we were practicing or 2) I was unable to understand what they were saying. For more minor concerns like grammatical errors or awkward word choice, I learned to disregard them as long as I could understand my student. I felt like applying this strategy allowed me to focus on the most important aspect of speech: communication.
Volunteer Oboe Instructor
Once a week, I voluntarily teach oboe to four students at a high school, and I’ve been doing this since February. Although music is very different from writing, I’ve utilized some similar practices when tutoring both subjects. For one, Writing Center Core Belief #2: There is no universal writing process that all writers (should use), applies for both subjects. For writers, this core belief means that different writers will need different strategies to accomplish a goal and that different processes work best for various individuals.
The same idea applies for music; I’ve had to get to know each of my students to know what each of them struggles with and how they best learn. For example, I have one student who struggles with remembering fingerings, so I’ve learned to quiz her and review all relevant fingerings before we play a piece of music. Meanwhile, I have another student who struggles with regulating the amount of air that is needed for different notes, so we practice the notes that require the most air in isolation before playing a piece.
Additionally, the Writing Center core practices of “provide text-specific feedback” and “provide generalizable and transferable feedback” are also applicable to this position. At the Writing Center, I’ve interpreted these core practices to mean that I should be basing my feedback on what I see in the writer’s text, but I should explain concepts in a way that they can be applied to other texts as well. Music is very similar: the comments I make are informed by how the student plays, but I explain my suggestions in a way that they are applicable even when playing a different piece.
When comparing my Writing Center job and other tutoring positions, there are some practices that I use for both and others that differ greatly. Reflecting on these similarities and differences has allowed me to consider why I chose to adopt some practices but not others, and analyze whether my decisions as to what practices I adopt are accurate to the needs and nature of each role.
Do you have other teaching, tutoring or mentoring positions besides your job at the Writing Center? How do your practices for each job differ or overlap?