The session I observed today was with an ESL student. The first thing the consultant asked was, "What are we looking at?" The student said she wanted help mostly with grammar, and the consultant then laid out the "map" they were going to follow in the session: they would read through the paper and catch mistakes as they went, then look at the paper overall, and then touch on anything leftover at the end. The consultant gave a good amount of control to the student too--he said that he could read the paper aloud if she preferred (which she did), and that if she wanted, he could make a copy of her paper so they could both work with one.
As they went through, it seemed to me that the consultant would make the changes he saw (in pencil) and then ask if it was okay. In areas like grammar I highly doubt the student was going to tell him not to make the changes, but in a way I saw this as taking too much control since he didn't step back and explain to her why her word choice or sentence structure was awkward.
Also, as I tried to follow their progress in the paper (I was looking at it upside-down), I noticed an MLA citation mistake the student made consistently but that the consultant hadn't mentioned to her, even though he corrected another similar formatting mistake. For a while I wasn't sure what to do. It felt like I would be overstepping my bounds if I suddenly jumped in and pointed out something the other tutor had missed, and at the same time I didn't want the student to feel like the two of us were "ganging up" on her and pointing out weaknesses in her paper. I eventually did say something since I know how picky teachers can be about formatting, and the consultant and client didn't seem to mind at all.
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