While reading Gillespie and Lerner’s strategy, I found the freewriting strategy to be extremely interesting. I feel as though it would be most useful for a student who is having a hard time determining their thoughts of the essay prompt, and how they want to respond to it. Freewriting might be most useful when paired with an outline draft. After the student completes their freewriting of the essay question or prompt, it may be useful for them to start moving in to drafting an outline to organize their thoughts. This strategy would be highly beneficial to students who have yet to start writing their essay. Another strategy Gillespie and Lerner introduce is the clustering strategy. Clustering may possibly help a student to get a better understanding of how their ideas may, or may not fit together. Organizing my ideas is often something that I struggle with as a writer, so I may also be able to utilize this strategy.
One of the many ideas that really stuck out to me while reading was the idea of asking students open-ended questions, rather than simple yes or no questions. By asking these types of questions, it creates more of an emphasis on the student and their ideas. This allows for the student to grow as a writer and be able to develop different ways of thinking about their writing, rather than simply writing what they think their professor wants. Asking open-ended questions will also help me to refrain from editing their paper when I should be revising. Gillespie and Lerner talk about how a tutor almost needs to gain the trust of the student before diving straight into reading their paper. In order to gain their trust, there needs to be a little conversation in order to get the student to feel more comfortable sharing with you. This conversation can be easily started by asking open-ended questions about the essay (or the prompt if they haven’t started writing yet). I never recognized how important it is to keep the emphasis on the student’s ideas and their growth, rather than helping them to edit. After reading, it makes total sense! I am definitely going to try to start my tutoring sessions this way, and hopefully it will create an environment where the student feels comfortable sharing their ideas with me.
Fears and Anxieties
- Pointing students in the wrong direction
- Being blamed for their bad grade
- Not knowing the right thing to say, or when to say it
- Not being helpful
- Not creating an environment where the student feels comfortable
