observation sessions

I observed two sessions in the past two days and both consultants used some very different methods and also a few that coincided. But on a different note, both sessions involved tutoring international students which to me is a really big responsibility. For me it seems like a really tough task to tutor someone who comes from a completely different background and I may not always fully understand what the tutor is saying. It turns out that in each session the tutors were able to connect well with the students and help them effectively. I hope that once I become a tutor I will be confident enough to cross that slight barrier and have a successful session with the student.

Now on with the bigger picture. In the first session the tutor asked the student to read her paper aloud paragraph by paragraph, pausing after each one to discuss ideas and problems. This seemed to be very helpful, they were able to discuss the content of each paragraph and how it connects to the focus of her assignment. The tutor always started with a compliment and then mentioned any confusion or mechanical errors in the paragraph. I thought that the support before the criticism was a very nice way of getting things started. The tutor used guiding question to try and help the student see why a sentence didn't make sense or did not connect to the rest of the paragraph. When it came to grammar mistakes, he would point out one and tell her to check the paper for other such mistakes. There was slight trouble with letting the student know what he wanted sometimes, because she didn't understand what he was suggesting. This would often lead to the tutor having to spell out what he thought the student should do, but he would always offer multiple ways to solve the problem so that she could make up her own mind about what she wanted to put in the paper. When the session was over he pointed out all of the good things about her paper and reminded her about any of the major things they had discussed.

In the second session I observed the tutor read the paper aloud because the student said she did not feel comfortable reading it aloud herself. I felt that this was a major loss because when the student reads her own paper she can catch her own grammatical errors or change the wording of sentences while she reads without the tutor having to mention it. Also the tutor read the whole paper at one time. This was beneficial because you could tell if the paper as a whole answered the assignments question. At the same time, I found that I preferred going section by section because that way you don't forget anything you want to tell the student about that certain section. During the session there were certain parts of the students paper that were not cohesive or just plain did not fit. This would not have been a problem except that the student was unable to explain what she was trying to say so that the tutor could figure out why she was confused. This led to the tutor not being able to fully help the student figure out what was wrong and how to fix it.

The similarities between the two sessions were that both tutors started with compliments and then moved into critiquing. They both asked the student if he was comfortable reading his paper aloud or if he would prefer for the tutor to read it aloud. They both concluded their sessions by reiterating the main discoveries during the session and told the student the better parts of her essay.

I found having these two very different sessions to be very helpful in letting me know what kind of tutoring techniques I want to develop and what kind of problems I might encounter when trying to help international students.