Shadowing at the Center, Round 2

My second shadowing session served to do two things to my psyche - it got me very excited about what the center does and what I will eventually be able to do, and it terrified me; how will I ever be as good at this as this consultant was?! But now I'll go to the beginning...

While the consultant was making copies, I asked the student how she came to be at the writing center. She said she was a freshman and that her professor had told her class about the Center, telling them to seek its services if they needed them. I soon found that the student was quite an avid writer, and so I was pleasantly surprised that she'd utilized her resources so soon in her college career. When the consultant returned, she explained some basic procedure to the student since it was her first time there, and made sure she was comfortable before proceeding. After having the student read aloud, she was quick to ask what the student wanted out of the session, how she felt about what she had completed, and how she felt about the edits she'd already made on her own. She was always sure to do what the student wanted and didn't force any ideas or paper-developing tactics on her.

One thing that really stood out was that this consultant was constantly saying what she liked about the piece and giving really genuine compliments. Instead of focusing on how to fix things that were wrong, she focused on expanding and elaborating on the ideas that were already good. The student's main concern was expanding her piece, she just didn't know how to go about doing that. The consultant had no trouble finding great beginnings of ideas to expand and really made the student feel good about her writing. She asked a lot of guiding questions like, "how do you want the reader to feel?" "how do you want to wrap this up?" and "how can we incorporate YOU into this to make it stand out?" She was always checking to make sure the student was comfortable with everything, and even introduced some "writing jargon" like scene and exposition to help the student think about her work academically. When the session wrapped, I just asked the consultant how she got so good at what she did, and she was very kind in reassuring me that after some practice, I'll be just as confident and helpful. She even shared her own "crash and burn" story, which put me at ease as well - not that she crashed and burned, but that no one is perfect and no one is expecting perfection.