The Art of the Flowchart
The infamous flowchart, an unorganized mind’s best friend. Seeing as I don’t know how to do anything fancy with word processors, I’m just going to write down all the steps in a nice, long paragraph. You can use your imagination to visualize what it looks like.
First and foremost, I think the smiling is in order. This may even happen before you the tutee comes in. I think smiling is important because it shows the student that you want to help. If the tutee saw the tutor frowning and looking rather unpleasant, I think the tutee would be more standoffish than if the tutor was smiling. It shows that you’re happy to help them. When they see that you’re happy and willing to help, the session can be much more productive.
Second, greet them and introduce yourself. This makes it a little more personal and the student will feel more comfortable around you. The more comfortable they are, the easier it will be to get them to express their ideas and explain their struggles with the paper.
Next, find out what the assignment is about and what the student wants help with. Doing this allows you to get a feel for where the session is going to go. Developing an understanding of these things will help you as you make a “map” for the session, which is the next step.
Having a map shows both you and the tutee where the session is going to go. If you get off track, you can use the map to get back on course and accomplish what you wanted to in the first place (yes, I know that sometimes the map needs to be disregarded or that it may end up being of no use in the end, but that is another blog for another day).
The next step that I would suggest would be to decide “how” the session is going to proceed. By this I mean decide who will read and all those “little” things. The tutor does not always have to read the paper. Sometimes it can be more beneficial to the student if he or she reads the paper.
After this, proceed.
It is also important to recognize that these steps can change depending on the student. Last semester I was in a tutoring session and I was the one reading the paper. As I read, I noticed that most of what the student needed in his paper wasn’t discussed in our “pre-meeting.” He had told me what he wanted to focus on and as we read I realized that there were other things, bigger things, that we needed to work on. So, I stopped we discussed these points. He was mostly concerned at first with organization, but his paper was organized just fine, it was commas, grammar, and whatnot that he struggled with. So, I asked him if he would like to read the paper instead of me, because I felt this would help him learn more. He did and the session ended up being very productive for the both of us!
This list of ideas has helped me quite a bit and I hope it can be of service to others.
First and foremost, I think the smiling is in order. This may even happen before you the tutee comes in. I think smiling is important because it shows the student that you want to help. If the tutee saw the tutor frowning and looking rather unpleasant, I think the tutee would be more standoffish than if the tutor was smiling. It shows that you’re happy to help them. When they see that you’re happy and willing to help, the session can be much more productive.
Second, greet them and introduce yourself. This makes it a little more personal and the student will feel more comfortable around you. The more comfortable they are, the easier it will be to get them to express their ideas and explain their struggles with the paper.
Next, find out what the assignment is about and what the student wants help with. Doing this allows you to get a feel for where the session is going to go. Developing an understanding of these things will help you as you make a “map” for the session, which is the next step.
Having a map shows both you and the tutee where the session is going to go. If you get off track, you can use the map to get back on course and accomplish what you wanted to in the first place (yes, I know that sometimes the map needs to be disregarded or that it may end up being of no use in the end, but that is another blog for another day).
The next step that I would suggest would be to decide “how” the session is going to proceed. By this I mean decide who will read and all those “little” things. The tutor does not always have to read the paper. Sometimes it can be more beneficial to the student if he or she reads the paper.
After this, proceed.
It is also important to recognize that these steps can change depending on the student. Last semester I was in a tutoring session and I was the one reading the paper. As I read, I noticed that most of what the student needed in his paper wasn’t discussed in our “pre-meeting.” He had told me what he wanted to focus on and as we read I realized that there were other things, bigger things, that we needed to work on. So, I stopped we discussed these points. He was mostly concerned at first with organization, but his paper was organized just fine, it was commas, grammar, and whatnot that he struggled with. So, I asked him if he would like to read the paper instead of me, because I felt this would help him learn more. He did and the session ended up being very productive for the both of us!
This list of ideas has helped me quite a bit and I hope it can be of service to others.
posted by Derek Stout at 3:38 PM
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