Chelsea: Marquette County tutor

Certified Tutor

As a Tutor, I believe my purpose is to help students learn to transform their profound and thoughtful ideas into words. To effectively understand and organize their own thoughts, students need to learn how to question themselves. Students often learn this practice originally from another person questioning their ideas. I plan to help students learn to question themselves through questioning ideas they may not have questioned before. Consequently, I hope the students will think critically not only as they write their current papers, but also when they write other works in college and beyond.

In most cases, I intend to take the facilitative approach to tutoring, as explained by the RWIT Center at Dartmouth. Instead of telling students what they need to do, I would prefer to lead them to consider how they can improve their writing through asking them specific questions and giving them suggestions instead of commands. However, the facilitative approach to tutoring writing does not work in every situation. For example, a tutor should not ask students to question why MLA format is the way that it is. Some aspects of writing are simply standard because they have become established as a part of the academic discourse. In these cases, I believe using the directive approach would be more helpful to help resolve students' issues. I intend to modify the approaches I use depending on both the subject being discussed and each student's need.

To encourage students to think creatively, I will implement creative approaches to tutoring them, depending on the needs of each student. Some students may benefit from mapping their ideas out visually. Others may need the energy to concentrate on their ideas, so I will give them a few minutes to themselves to finish a task, such as writing their thesis. After all, as Jeff Brooks asserts in his "Minimalist Tutoring," a deadline is the ultimate energizer for writers. While not all aspects of minimalist tutoring may be helpful, I hope to incorporate other strategies which Jeff Brooks recommends as well, such as focusing on the successes rather than failures of the paper, especially in the beginning and conclusion of the session, and encouraging the student to write notes in their own words on their paper instead of doing all of the note-taking myself.

When working as a Teaching Assistant for the Human Event, I realized that often students simply need someone to whom they can communicate their ideas aloud. As a result, I am endeavoring to become a better listener. I believe that through discussing students' papers with the students and asking them questions throughout each tutoring session, I will learn from them at least as much as they will learn from me. I hope to demonstrate that I am sincerely curious about the students' thoughts by encouraging them to continue working with their ideas until their ideas are specific and arguable. Particularly, to show both my interest in their ideas and my desire to help them, I will begin each session by asking the student what they want to focus on in the session. Additionally, I will respond to all of the students' questions and concerns with energy and encouragement.

Overall, I hope to lead students to gain confidence with their writing, reading, and studying in general. Often students think that they are incapable of writing well simply because they believe they are naturally not good writers, but I believe that all students can learn how to write well, although learning this takes time, practice, and dedication. I hope to inspire students to be open-minded and to help them to realize that they can learn from the writing process not only how to write, but how to think critically, which will certainly assist them throughout the rest of their lives, regardless of their careers.