Leading a Session - #1

This experience was technically co-consulting, but it really ended up being more of another observation session for me, which was disappointing. The consultant I worked with dominated the session and didn't really leave much room for me to add anything. I also didn't agree with the majority of the changes that she made, but I didn't want to object and confuse the client even more, or bombard her with too much criticism.

The client today was an ESL student with a paper criticizing the book "Guns, Germs, and Steel." It was a long paper, and the consultant told her right away that they weren't going to get through the whole thing. This was actually a gross under-exaggeration, because it took almost half an hour to get through the first paragraph. The consultant wanted to make all kinds of specific pages and basically had the client rewrite the entire paragraph. Many of them I didn't see as necessary at all since the student's point would still be the same. The consultant didn't completely take charge of the session and make all the corrections herself, but the sheer volume of suggestions she made had to be intimidating for the client. A lot of times she skipped over obvious grammatical errors in favor of rewriting a sentence that already served its point. Basically she was trying to change the student's delivery of her argument, when all that was needed was clearer language in certain areas.

I actually did manage to chime in when they skipped ahead to the conclusion of the paper. The conclusion seemed to focus on the fact that the author had a good argument rather than on the flaws in it, which is what the paper was about. I pointed this out to the client, and she reworded a sentence to make the paragraph work better with the rest of her paper. I'd also like to note that because of the extensive changes made to the introduction, the consultant found it necessary to spend at least another 15 minutes on the conclusion to make the style there match the new style of the introduction. This wasn't intrusive on the student's writing itself since the consultant didn't just jump in and reword everything, but the student's style was completely altered.