A lot of things come with trying to help someone. People come
to certain people for advice, weither it be educational, financial or even
social advice. Tutoring in my opinion is a very similar concept. There are many
strategies and ways to go about tutoring someone. One would say it is
situational as how we spoke about people having different ways of getting advice
in our everyday lives. To me when it comes to tutoring it is very obvious what
to do and what not to do, but the key is how you do it.
There are many do’s and dont’s when it comes to tutoring,
but first I want to start with what to do and how to do it. When it comes to
tutoring the main thing to do is to realize what the High Order Concerns are. We
have to focus on what’s important and how we are going to go about fixing the
issue. Examples of a High Order Concern are things like no thesis, or not
having any/enough evidence to support a certain argument, leaving the readers
confused not understanding whets going on. The main thing we have to stress is
to not focus on things like spelling and grammar, even though those things will
need to be fixed eventually. When noticing the issues of a paper after revising
it once personally, it is important to ask the tutee what was the main point
they were trying to get across, and what evidence did they use to support it. The
main thing in any paper is to have a strong thesis and even stronger evidence
that supports it and our job as a tutor is to make sure that the tutee does
that very thing. Also we must try to give the tutee some confidence about their
writing. The way of doing so is by talking to them about what they did well and
what their strong suites are, but we should never give them false praise or
tell them what they have written is perfect because that won’t benefit them in
any way, which brings me to what not to do when it comes to tutoring.
There are even more things that you absolutely cannot do
when it comes to tutoring compared to the things we should do. The main and most
important of them all in my opinion is focusing on Low Order Concerns, such as
spelling, grammar etc. besides that point there are six other things that a
tutor must stay away from. Those six things are cheerleading, correcting
errors, therapy, using ownership, being an expert, and responding too late. All
these concepts are pretty much self explanatory but by breaking them down one
by one we can see the true issue behind each. The first issue is cheerleading;
we must not give the tutee false praise and be there just to make the tutee
feel better. Our job is to give constructive criticisms that well help/support
the tutees into becoming better writers. The second issue was correcting; by
simply correcting spelling and grammar errors we avoid the main issues and what
needs to be fixed in the students writing. Therapy simply is what it means. You
are not there to be the tutees therapist and to hang out with them while
talking about things outside of the paper, you are both there to focus on the
task at hand and it’s on the tutor to set the tone on how the session will go. Using
ownership is basically saying you are there to help, not to do the work. Tutees
catch a tendency to expect the tutor to fix and do all the work but what well
would that do? It must be a learning experience, which in my opinion goes with
being an expert; neither the student nor the tutor are experts and must work by
using the basics and fixing the main/obvious issues. Lastly is responding too
late; if you can’t respect the tutees time and be considerate knowing that they
have other things to do and have to get their work done by a certain time. Their
work does not revolve around your schedule.
As can be seen, there are many do’s and dont’s with
tutoring, but our job as tutors is to utilize the basics of what we’ve learned
and to install that into our tutees. By focusing on the main issues and not
drifting off in the many ways that we can when it comes to our “dont’s” we will
be successful in assisting whoever it is that needs help. By sticking with the
main/High Order Concerns we will always direct the tutees towards a well
written paper and also open their eyes for more papers to come.
