First Tutoring Session Observations

Hello reader, my name is Karen and I am currently enrolled in a "Teaching Writing" class in LaGuardia Community College. In this blog post I will be writing about my observations during my first tutoring session at the writing center in Laguardia. At the beginning of the tutoring session, the tutor asked the "tutee" what it was he needed help with specifically and then asked to see the assignment given by the tutee's professor, to understand what the paper should look like. Together, the student and tutor went over the guidelines of the assignment and then the tutor had the student read-out-loud his paper. The tutor would stop the student when he heard or saw any misspellings or other parts of the paper that needed to be corrected, but would first go over the sentence to see if the student could catch the error before the tutor had to point it out and would ask if "this was what he meant to say" before talking about changing anything. A lot of times through out the session the tutor would refer back to the assignment to make sure the student was doing as instructed by the assignment. Although during the session the tutor focused manly on "Lower Order Concerns" (Spelling, grammar, punctuation) which we are taught in class and in our readings ("Tutoring Writing") that it would not be ideal to focus on this during a tutoring session, at the end of the session the tutor spoke to the student about where he needed to improve his "Big Ideas" and where the student needed to further develop his paper to be what the assignment asked for.  Overall it was a good first impression and first tutoring observation.