Teaching and tutoring is a constant learning process. The learning is not only meant to be done by the student but by the teacher as well. My teaching philosophy demonstrates that a teacher of writing is only effective if the end result is a better person and a better writer and not only a better paper. A good amount of the time a teacher will grade a paper and never really explain what it was about the paper that deserved that grade. Correcting a student’s work without really looking at it will not give the student the feedback to truly improve themselves and their writing.
Concentrating on the higher level concerns is of the utmost importance to me and within my philosophy. The grammar and sentence level issues are caught by the computer a lot of times in this technological age. The computer cannot help a student with their organization and idea structure however. These are concerns that only a student along with their tutor or teacher can tackle. I have mixed some teaching and tutoring philosophies together to come up with my own spin on what I feel the best method for teaching and tutoring writing.
In regards to teaching and tutoring I believe that a mixture of the personal growth approach and an interdisciplinary approach. The student needs to be comfortable with what they are writing about and the key to making that happen for them is to introduce them to all different kinds of writing and writing styles. This will pull the student out of the shell of thinking there is only one correct way to write a sentence or portray an idea. I also believe that while you want to make sure a student has the tools they need to write well, the paper is not the most important focus of a lesson. A teacher will always get a better paper from an improved writer but you will not always get a better writer from an improved paper. The student has to be the one to learn and grow and not only the papers that they turn in.
My tutoring philosophy is a student lead approach. The tutor should be minimally involved with making changes to the paper; the student should be responsible for any and all changes made throughout the tutoring session. This is closely related to the minimalist approach though my philosophy doesn’t go to quite the extreme student base that Brook’s takes in his minimalist approach. The tutor should be pulling out the positive aspects of the paper and bringing the negative to the student’s attention through the use of questions. The student can use the tutor as a guide to make changes throughout their own paper and as someone who they can bounce ideas off of. A tutoring session should be seen as a collaborative process. The tutor should not feed information to the student but should not be afraid to push the student if they need a little extra help.
The key to be a good teacher and tutor is to ask questions. The only person who can give you insight into a student’s paper is the student themselves. A tutor should be listening to the student’s ideas and making sure that those ideas are what is being communicated through the paper, if it is not then the student should be prodded to make changes to benefit the idea. The teacher should look at all aspects of a paper, but should pay special attention to the ideas. A teacher needs to keep in mind that a paper that is underdeveloped may not always come from a lazy student. These papers may come from a student that has excellent ideas but lacks the tools to properly communicate them.
I have personally seen great ideas from students in the York College’s Learning Resource Center that have been ill communicated by the student. The most effective examples of tutoring I have seen are the ones where the tutor lets the student take the reins of their paper and lead the sessions. Students are the ones who know their learning style best, they are also the ones who can tell you whether what you are getting from an assignment is what they intended to put in it. The same goes with teaching, allowing a student run assignment sounds counterproductive to most teachers and if the assignment were wholly based on the students wants it may be. The way to intermingle true learning and allowing personal growth is to give the students choices. I have written an assignment that teaches a student about different disciplines, and allows them some choices within the assignment in order to make the project their own. This gives the structure to the teacher to grade all of the students on the same scale but the freedom to the students to take something more away from the project than just a grade.
In my groups classroom lesson we had a lot of different styles converging and yet we still had an area in the lesson that lent itself to the student run theory. The lesson included a section that involved pulling out the acceptable aspects of an introduction, and changing a bad introduction to make it better. This gives the students the opportunity to show the teacher what they know and what they can learn from the rest of the lesson. A teacher can take their cues from the students and go as slowly and quickly as the students need.
By taking the concepts of interdisciplinary learning and mixing it with the student lead type of teaching that I believe in the teacher and tutor helps to create well rounded students that are interested in writing. The student basis keeps the students on track and inhibits feelings of inadequacy that the correctness approach can sometimes instill. There is no correct way to teach writing but working together with the students can assure that the students and teacher are getting as much out of the course as possible. If you give a student a quick fix you will improve that paper. If you teach a student a skill you will not only improve the current paper but all subsequent papers as well.