Journal 10
Journal 10
This week, I added two extra hours on top of my normal schedule due to two cancelled classes. With this increased availability, I was able to view different tutors and their approaches to tutoring. I met with my ENGL 121 student, I assisted a student I had met with last week twice, and I assisted a new student. For each of these students, the focus of our meetings was mostly on developing essays.
Summary: I had my first regular student who was not enrolled in the ENGL 121 class this week. We met last week over Zoom on Friday, and this week we met up twice to go over different assignments and to prepare for future coursework. It was good reinforcement to my renewed focus on developing and maintaining connections with students as I meet with them. I assisted her with further revisions on her grounds and warrants for a debate write-up and then began going over a larger essay focusing on research into a chosen career. She had mostly completed both assignments, so our focus was on topicality and development. With my ENGL 121 student, we revised the essay we had brainstormed last week. Mostly, we focused on content and structure, but we also touched on some of the more major grammar issues as we came across them. Though she was still stressed (reasonably so as we are approaching the end of the semester), she was in a better place than even last week and was very proactive in her tutoring hour. My new student struggled to understand her assignment guidelines, so I tried to walk her through one of the more complicated questions and what approach she should take when answering it.
Challenges: The new student I met with struggled with reading comprehension to a higher degree than I am used to dealing with. However, having learned a bit from my previous session with a similar student towards the beginning of the semester, I tried to reevaluate where we were at continuously throughout the session rather than assuming a base level of understanding. This way, I was better able to pinpoint where the problems were popping up. It was difficult knowing how to explain complicated questions without knowing where the issue was popping up, so I broke up those questions into multiple smaller parts. For example, with the question "What voices are privileged and what voices are missing [in the AI's sources compared to your sources]?", I first inserted the implied comparison into the question: between the AI's sources and the student's own sources. Then, I asked them what "privileged" meant and how a voice could be privileged or missing. Finally, I gave them examples about a different topic with privileged and missing voices to help them understand what the question meant in a simpler context. All the while, I made sure to ask comprehension questions (e.g., What does privilege mean? What does it mean in this context? What search terms would you use to look this definition up? What is an example of a privileged voice in our assignment's context?) to ensure I was on the same page as my student.
I was worried that I was either moving too quickly or providing the wrong questions, but at the end of the session, my student did seem to understand what the question was asking her. I felt satisfied at my tangible progress: she not only began correctly answering my questions, but she also seemed more positive by the end! This is in stark contrast to my last student who was in the same situation yet did not seem to have made much progress even after my help. I certainly need more training on reading comprehension as opposed to writing ability, but at least I know that my efforts to this point have been productive.
Ideas or theories: Judging by my new recurring student, making a more conscious effort to foster laughter with my synchronous online students has been successful. I observed greater learner retention and willingness to engage in the writing process, though it is hard to project this one experience to a broader trend. Asking questions about my own performance has not seen as much success, perhaps because many students do not feel comfortable criticizing someone they have received help with, so I will likely instead ask about what worked rather than what did not. I have also discovered the importance of continuous reading comprehension questions that actually require the learner's input. I knew this, but I had not quite realized its practical uses. For the most part, I relied on occasional check-ins throughout the session, which seemed to work well for more advanced students, but even those students may have benefitted from more regular assessments to ensure what they understood matched with what I thought I was teaching.
My clients are the students I tutor every session. They regularly change, though I have some returning clients, and I work with them directly in a one-on-one setting where I assist them with their reading and writing needs. Of course, the most important aspect of my job is not only providing feedback for their reading and writing skills, but also guiding their skills in recognition of their greater goals and needs. The students are not required to take in any help I provide, so gauging to what extent they want my help tells me what sorts of help I should provide. Often times, this is not communicated directly (I have not often had students inform me that their only wish is to pass a class or to fulfill a help-seeking requirement); therefore, I need to keep in mind their explicitly stated and implicitly noted needs. Sometimes this means getting them through a paper and onto the next and other times this means improving their abilities as a writer even outside of academia.
I anticipate mainly working with students of approximately high school or college age as I move forward with my career, though of course my plans are bound to shift. I want to pursue a career in college education, but I would also like to teach abroad in high schools, so my options as of now are fairly open. No matter my clients, however, the same skills I have already learned will still apply. I may need to acquire more specific skills for more specific client groups, but the general principles of teaching should still hold true.