Part V
‘Making Explicit What We Take for Granted’:
The Minimalist Tutoring Philosophy in
The New Humanities Reader Classroom[1]

 

The pedagogy of The New Humanities Reader at Rutgers complements classroom work with a network of Writing Centers, where students can receive one-on-one tutoring from a writer who is more experienced than they are. Our tutors are strong undergraduate writers, graduate students, and composition instructors. At the Writing Centers the students receive additional guidance—though crucially not instruction—in the process of writing the papers required in their composition course. In this section, we will the tutoring philosophy of the Writing Centers, and how it can enhance classroom practice by helping students to implement the lessons that we teach them in order to make them stronger, more independent writers.

           The tutoring philosophy used in the Writing Centers at Rutgers is called Minimalist Tutoring.[2] Minimalist tutoring focuses on the process of writing of paper, with the understanding that learning the skills that will make a student a stronger writer will take more than one, or two sessions to acquire. Thus, rather than focusing on the results of a particular tutoring session when measuring a student’s success, we judge a successful Minimalist tutor to be one who gives the student the skills they need to read and write independently by the end of a semester. Our ultimate goal—and one which informs The New Humanities Reader pedagogy in the classroom also—is to make the student into an indepen­dent writer, one who, when we have finished our job, can write an accomplished academic essay without our help. The role of the teacher or tutor, then, becomes one of the coach, rather than lecturer or editor. This approach complements our focus on exploratory, student-centered learning as the way into working with The New Humanities Reader—it is the student’s job to make meaning by applying the tools and skills that we present to her, rather than the teacher’s job to hand down wisdom from an exalted position.

           Minimalist tutoring also fosters a more dialogue-based approach to reading and writing. Every tutoring session in the Writing Center involves some discussion of a student’s interpretation of a reading, or idea about an assignment question or a possible connection between two texts. We ask the student questions that allow her to explore her own position in relation to the authors, as well as helping her to place herself in a dialogue with the ideas in the essays in The New Humanities Reader. We thus make the student accountable not only for her interpretation of the texts, but also for providing evidence for that interpretation. However, during every tutoring session the tutor will require that the discussion stops, and writing starts, so that the student has a record of her good ideas that she can go back to when she is away from class, or from the writing center. We will also ask


students to take notes of the tools they used to get to their ideas and their responses to the texts, so that they have strategies to take home and apply themselves, without the tutor there to remind them what tools the students have access to. Minimalist Tutoring aims to help students articulate themselves, in writing, in many different ways, so that students become as comfortable with writing as a medium for expressing themselves, and they need or want out of their writing process, as they are in the verbal domain. The Minimalist tutoring pedagogy therefore lets us tap into the relative comfort that most students feel about expressing themselves verbally, but in a way that translates this fluency into written work.

           We can apply this philosophy in the composition classroom. Once again, the practice of Minimalist tutoring asks the teacher to put her own expertise aside. Rather than asking the student to imitate her final product, or what she requires of a final product, Minimalist tutoring asks the teacher to break down the process of writing well, rather than teaching from the experience of writing well. We are, after all, asking students to imitate the process, not the experience. Furthermore, it is much easier to communicate the former than the latter. The challenge thus becomes one of teaching students the steps of the process so that they can apply those steps to their own writing.

           The philosophy of the Writing Center, thus, extends beyond that particular context, and can help instructors become more effective also. Besides giving us ways to reinforce the student-centered pedagogy which informs the activities presented above, it also has the practical application of helping us to design effective in-class activities that focus on and contribute to the students’ writing process by making them more active in it than the teacher is, but it also helps us to engage more productively with students on a one-to-one basis.

           This latter situation arises, of course, most often in office hours. We supplement our in-class teaching by providing students to meet with us in our offices, but it is often difficult to go beyond what feels like a good office-hours talk, and make that discussion into something that the students know how to use in developing their own writing. The strategies used by our writing center tutors can be useful in changing the dynamic of office hours into something that gives the student something that you will see in their next draft, as well as in the classroom with a group of students.

           In the sections below we have some Writing Center-style activities that have been put to good use in the classroom by composition teachers at Rutgers.

Writing in Stages

When handing out the assignment, ask students to free-write their own response to the assignment question, for about half a page. This writing is not collected, but it helps students to develop a position of their own. Asking them to focus on key words or phrases in the assignment question can help. It also works well to ask students, when they have finished the exercise, to read through what they have written, and to draw a box around the sentence that they think might be most useful in answering the assignment question in the context of the readings, and then to write another half a page on how that answer would work. From here we can then go back to this second paragraph and again ask the student to write out of a new “best” idea, perhaps making closer and closer reference to the assigned readings at each stage.

           The student is writing in generalities, but as they go on writing and then reviewing their writing, we can ask them to engage more and more closely with the readings, all the while having something of their own that is written and that they can go back to in order to develop their own ideas. Each step helps the student close in on a concrete project, concrete engagement with text, et cetera. This exercise also makes the process of revision easy and non-threatening, and shows the student how it helps them get somewhere, even if they are discarding text. Teachers can also intervene to help students find their best sentences, identifying the characteristics of a good sentence, or students can read each other’s work. Students quickly develop a good eye for each others’ writing, if given good instructions.

Post-Draft Outline

This is useful in helping students to work on their original statement of project, and to build their introduction. This kind of drafting differs crucially from what the students know of outlining from high school, because it is a response to writing they have already done, rather than a map of writing that they will do. It also allows us to draw on the tendency that the clearest statement of a student’s project will come at the end of the rough draft, in what they consider to be the conclusion.

           In a post-draft outline the student writes a brief summary of what they are saying in each paragraph on a separate sheet of paper. We ask them to keep to one or two sentences in their summary, and to focus on the main idea that they’re developing there (and using to build connections, etc.).

           We can also ask the student to read through their paper and find the place where they think answer the assignment question most clearly. In the student’s quest for a thesis statement, this can often be an exciting moment. Such a moment often occurs towards the end of a rough draft.

           We can then ask the student to go their rough-draft outline, and show us the moments in the paragraphs where they actually do what they claim to do. This is often helpful in bridging that gap between a student’s feeling of his own paper, and what he has actually put on the page.

           A possible final step in the rough draft outline process can be to have the student then sum up, in two or three sentences, what they see themselves having done, or shown, or argued for in the paper. We can then compare it to their original thesis statement, talk about why the new one is a more accurate reflection of what they have actually done in their paper, and then start building a new introduction that really maps out the paper.

Small Steps

Small steps are crucial in Minimalist tutoring. It works to break a writing task down into steps that a student can accomplish and build on. While not all students require tiny steps, it is worth keeping the option open—strong students will go through the steps fast, but they will be aware of the process that took them to their finished result. For a weaker student, having a number of small steps that they can work through may make the difference between the student being able to write a paragraph that says something contentful, and being overwhelmed by the thought of having to produce four pages of text that respond to huge and difficult readings. If we can help students find ways in, they are more likely to be able to get to where they need to be on their own.

           Furthermore, bear in mind that the beginning isn’t always the best place to start. Students tend to be intimidated by the thought of having to write the perfect sentence which starts their paper off, and so will take great measures to avoid starting to write. But if we start by having the student explore a single quote, or an idea from a reading, and then respond to that, and then build a connection and explain it, then they quickly accumulate a mass of text before they have had to tackle that horrible first sentence. Starting from the texts, and from the middle of the paper, also helps students avoid writing an essay which is a “proof” of their opinion, and instead write an essay that responds to the texts, and to the assignment question, creating a conversation rather than an argument. If we focus on response, rather than invention, the process of generating original text becomes far less intimidating.

Writing Summaries

In the Writing Center we ask students to engage with quotations or excerpts from the texts by rewriting them in their own words. We can then ask students to account for what they have written in their summaries by returning to the texts, and help them to see places where their report of a reading, and what the author actually says, does not quite match up. It can also help them to see what the use of summary is, and that, while it’s not always useful for them to include summary in their own paper, it is useful to write summaries before they get to their own ideas.

           We have included below two discussions of applications of Writing Center pedagogy in the context of The New Humanities Reader classroom, to add to the more task-oriented activities given above.

Commenting
By Suzanne Diamond

During the years I have been teaching, the most important lesson I have learned about commenting on students’ essays is to direct my speech to the writer behind the essay rather than to become inordinately focused on the essay’s prose and compositional methods as they stand. As intuitively preferable as this focus on writer rather than on sentences and pages might sound—perhaps particularly to experienced teachers of writing—I have found that the commitment to this commenting philosophy requires a kind of vigilance. Often enough, for instance, I have experienced the temptation to obsess on an essay’s form under several, sometimes overlapping, situations: when I have invested considerable time with an essay’s writer and am experiencing disappointment in the written work that has come of that investment; when my need to “justify” a grade temporarily overshadows my more qualitative responsibilities toward the essay’s writer; and when I am just tired, have perhaps graded for too long in one sitting, and therefore bring less intuition to the task of helping the writer discover the avenues of revision suggested by a struggling draft.

           It sounds trite, but is worth repeating that the purpose of responses, after all, is less about familiarizing students with our intellectual skills and more about assisting them in the discovery of their own. “I don’t agree that the text says this” is a far less useful comment, therefore, than “Can you show where you see this in the text and explain?” (even—perhaps even especially—when you know the text will yield no support for the idea as stated!). To my mind, a good teacher’s comments have a quality I’d generally characterize as “coaching.” I am not inclined to specify more exact procedures, because I feel committed to the notion that there is room for individual style in what we do as teachers; but, in my experience, students respond most favorably when they discern in their instructor a coaching stance toward them, an approach that presupposes a writer’s sovereignty over her ideas, regardless of their present articulation.

Meeting in Your Office
By Ann Dean

When a student comes to your office hour for help, it can be frustrating. Often teachers will have great conversations with students and feel good about where the paper could go. Then the next draft will have no revisions, or the student will seem to have forgotten what the conversation in the office was about. In order to use office hours better, I have started using the same principles tutors use in the Writing Centers. We call this Minimalist tutoring. The central idea is that the tutor should be less active than the student. In other words, when a student comes to your office, ask him to read and write, rather than reading and writing for him. Here are some specific ways to do this:

 

Ask the student to find the most important passage in the reading and make a list of all the words, phrases, and ideas in it she does not understand. Then get out a dictionary for the difficult words and point out sentence constructions like “if . . . then” or “because.”

           Then have the student put the new version of the passage into her own words. Then, ask the student what she just did and how she did it. Ask her if she could do it at home, if you were not there, with another passage. And tell her that to improve her papers she needs to do that with every quotation in her paper.

           Ask the student to find the weakest paragraph in her paper (she can often do this). Ask her what is wrong with it. She might say that she wrote it just because she ran out of things to say but the paper wasn’t long enough, or a variety of other things.

           If you think the paragraph has potential, suggest a revision strategy. Ask her to write about her idea about the ideas in the paragraph. Ask her to find a quotation and insert it.

           Ask her to circle every important word or idea in a quotation and write about each one. Have her do this right there in your office (you can go get a soda or grade another paper). Then talk about how the paragraph is better or worse.

           If you don’t think the paragraph has potential, ask the student to find the best paragraph in the paper, and work on expanding it. The student can write endings to sentences like “This idea is important because . . .” “This idea would be important to the authors of the readings because . . .” “This idea is confusing because . . .” or “Someone who would be interested in this idea is . . . .” This way she can practice working with implications and suggestions.

           Then, ask the student what she just did and how she did it. Ask her if she could do it at home, if you were not there, with another passage. And tell her that to improve her papers she needs to do that with every paragraph in her paper.

           You can come up with your own strategies. Think about what you do when you read, write, and revise, and ask students to do those things in your office. That way they can see what it feels like to read, write, and revise in new ways.

Conclusion

Perhaps the most important point to be taken from this discussion of using the Minimalist tutoring philosophy in the classroom is that what we are striving to do is not instruct students on what to write, but rather, to suggest good strategies of how to write. We provide students with models of these strategies which they apply first under our supervision, but then can take home, and apply on their own. We try to make explicit the process of writing—which many instructors have naturalized—and give the students tools that can ultimately make them independent of us, and to think connectively not just about the content of their writing, but also about the practice of it.

           Tutoring techniques can serve as well in the classroom as they serve the tutors in the Writing Centers. We can use the Minimalist tutoring philosophy to promote connective thinking, reading and writing among students, and to help them bridge the gap being able to articulate their ideas verbally, and being able to write them down coherently. And, perhaps most importantly, employing tutoring techniques in the classroom helps the student to become a more independent writer, with an inventory of tools at her disposal that will serve her far beyond the end of her composition class.


[1] Much of this discussion was inspired by the essay by Anthony Lioi, Small Victories: The Practice and Process of Tutoring published in the Instructor’s Resource Manual for the first edition of The New Humanities Reader. The quotation in the title is taken from Alexandra Socarides’ essay The Position Problem: An Exercise in Revision in the same volume.

[2] Jeff Brooks, Minimalist Tutoring: Making the Student Do All The Work, Writing Lab Newsletter 15:6 (February 1991), 2.