Wait, That Was Pedagogy?: Metacognitive Reflection & the Choices We Make as Tutors

This year, as the assessments graduate assistant, my team surveyed our tutors about how they adapt their strategies to meet the needs and goals of unique writers. That’s the gist of assessment, really—the yearly work of asking a higher ed program if it’s doing what it says it’s doing, and then, with data, finding out. The results were, by every measure, exactly what we expected. The DePaul Writing Center is built on a staff of nice people and good writers, and they tutor like it. In the survey, tutors described centering writer agency—the writer’s authority over their own choices on the page; adjusting in real time to what the writing needed; honoring multilingualism and neurodiversity to meet writers where they were; and building rapport before offering revision. Every respondent agreed or strongly agreed that their work at the Writing Center had made them more effective with people, inside the Center and out, from a range of backgrounds, experiences, and cultures. Translation: our tutors are doing thoughtful, responsive, and culturally aware work.

But the more we read through the responses—sorting them into categories, looking for themes—we noticed another pattern. Tutors had a clear, specific language for what they did to adapt to different writers, but fewer explicitly named why that adaptation mattered: how each tutoring choice shaped learning, made room for linguistic diversity, or honored different ways of knowing. We kept seeing responses like I use a writer-led approach, or I come up with new strategies when I can tell something isn’t working. And tucked inside those sentences was a whole pedagogy—a set of teaching values steering those choices—that included agency, accessibility, rapport, cultural responsiveness, care, and transfer (the ability to carry what you learn from one piece of writing into the next).

The work was already there. The naming of it, sometimes, was not.

Tutoring asks us to make dozens of decisions in every appointment—when to ask another question, when to explain something in a fresh way, when to slow down, when to redirect, when to affirm, when to challenge, when to admit something falls out of our expertise. Most of those decisions happen quickly. Relationally. Intuitively. They can feel less like a teaching moment and more like simply trying to be the most helpful for that moment. But if assessment work shows that tutors already hold real teaching knowledge they just aren’t always identifying, then reflection is one of the most direct ways to close that gap.

To practice this reflection, I made it my goal throughout the quarter to identify three challenging tutoring moments from my own appointments and write short reflections on each. Not to revisit what happened, but to practice naming the pedagogical significance, or the why, behind the choices I had made.

What surprised me was that the moments I chose weren’t difficult because something had gone wrong. They were difficult because they asked me to make complex choices while managing my own emotions as a tutor. I reflected on an appointment that activated my imposter syndrome, on the labor of giving similar feedback across multiple sessions, and on the experience of needing to set boundaries around what kind of help I could ethically provide under the Writing Center’s scope. In the moment, those appointments felt like uncertainty, burnout, pressure. But through reflection, I started to see them differently—not only as emotional experiences, but as moments of teaching and learning.

Take one of my reflections, for example, in which I reconsidered an appointment I had with a doctoral student working on a dissertation proposal. I logged onto our appointment already feeling that familiar tug of imposter syndrome—the project felt much bigger than what I could reasonably make time for in one appointment, and their disciplinary knowledge extended well beyond my own. During our session, the writer wanted to focus on active versus passive voice, and at first, I felt some resistance to this revision area. I kept thinking about the hierarchy of concerns ingrained in my tutoring practice: global before local, structure before sentences, meaning before polish. I worried that if we spent too much time on sentence level revision, we’d lose the chance to work through the bigger conceptual work the proposal still needed. But dismissing their concern would have meant dismissing the place where they felt stuck. For the writer, active voice wasn’t just grammar, but a way of imagining the proposal less as a project that might someday exist and more as a project already taking shape.

The more I reflected, the more I realized the appointment had asked me to rethink what counts as “local” revision. On paper, active versus passive voice is a sentence-level issue. But in this appointment, it paved our path into much larger questions about the writing process: What is this study doing? Who is doing the research? What methods are being used, and why? When I encouraged the writer to shift from what the proposal “will do” to what the paper is doing now, I wasn’t only talking about verbs. I was talking about their scholarly presence on the page, helping them see themselves as someone already making powerful choices and building knowledge for their field. While in the moment, I mostly experienced the appointment through the lens of uncertainty—Am I helping? Am I focusing on the right thing?—reflection let me see I’d been practicing responsiveness all along. What seemed like a small revision to me felt, to the writer, like the area preventing the whole project from becoming clear. Therefore, I had made the pedagogical choice to enter our conversation through the doorway of the writer’s stated concern rather than redirecting them toward the concern I thought mattered most. After all, my role is to honor writers’ agency while helping them notice how language choices shape authority, meaning, and reader understanding.

This distinction between “difficult appointments” and “learning experiences” changed how I think about emotional labor in tutoring. Emotional labor will never be separate from tutoring practice because it lives inside the choices we make. When I feel responsible for a writer’s confidence, I’m also thinking about agency and affirmation. When I feel frustrated that feedback isn’t transferring, I’m also confronting my own beliefs about revision and ownership. When I feel pulled to help beyond the scope of an appointment, I’m negotiating care, boundaries, and ethical responsibility.

Metacognitive reflection—the practice of thinking about my own thinking, naming the values and assumptions behind the choices I made in the moment—translates these feelings into knowledge. It is what lets me move past that appointment was challenging and instead ask: What made it hard? What did I choose to do? What value was I practicing, or what assumptions was I making? And how might I frame this differently next time?

Those questions helped me see that tutoring growth doesn’t always come from learning new strategies. Sometimes it comes from learning to notice and name the strategies we’re already using.

I’ve always called myself a “question-driven tutor,” a tutor geared toward asking generative questions and listening closely to root myself in responsiveness. Reflection helped me see that responsiveness doesn’t have to mean endless flexibility. It means discernment: What is the writer actually asking for, and what does the writing need? What can I offer here, in this hour, with this specific draft? What are the limits of my role?

The same has been true of writer agency. I’ve called it one of my core tutoring values since my first quarter at DePaul, and reflection has helped me sit more honestly with what it actually asks of me. If I really want to uplift writer agency, I have to trust the writer to take their draft in the direction that makes sense to them, even if it isn’t the direction I might have taken. The same goes for feedback—sometimes what I think a writer needs isn’t what they’re looking for, and sometimes it’s the other way around. My job is to offer thoughtful, specific, transferrable feedback that travels with the writer into the next assignment, the next class, the next year, What happens with that feedback belongs to the writer, and that’s the part I’ve learned to love the most. That’s how more voices, more stories, and more ways of telling these stories end up in the world.

And this is what metacognitive reflection gives us. It lets us name our work in order to strengthen our choices, what’s working and what is not. It lets us care about our work without carrying its full weight on our own shoulders. It reminds us that feeling uncertain doesn’t mean we’re failing. Sometimes, uncertainty just means we’re sitting with a real pedagogical tension, a moment where two teaching values we hold are pulling against each other. Burnout, too, can become information. It can show us where we’re taking on too much responsibility or where we need clearer boundaries.

The gift of doing this work alongside other tutors is that none of us has to figure out metacognitive reflection on our own. When we get better at naming our own pedagogical choices, the Writing Center as a whole gets better at naming the value of what it does. We can tell a fuller story than just tutors are helpful by articulating how tutors actually support writers- how they adapt across contexts, honor linguistic differences, ask important questions, build rapport, make revision visible, and help writers understand not only what they might change but why those choices matter. That story is one I’d love for more people to hear, including, sometimes, the tutors themselves.

What my year as the assessments graduate assistant has shown me, more than anything, is that tutors already hold an enormous amount of pedagogical knowledge, a real understanding of why tutoring works, not just how to do it. Reflection isn’t only a way to process appointments after they happen. It’s a way to make that knowledge visible to ourselves, to each other, and to the wider conversation about what tutoring is for. Sometimes we know what we’re doing before we know how to name it. Metacognitive reflection is how we learn the language.