Small Victories:
The Practice and Process of Tutoring

by Anthony Lioi

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In the Introduction to The New Humanities Reader, Richard Miller and Kurt Spellmeyer delineate the difference between "mimetic thinking," designed to demonstrate mastery of a pre-established realm of knowledge, and "connective thinking," which links disparate realms of learning in new and unexpected patterns to solve problems unanticipated by traditional forms of knowledge (17). The New Humanities Reader is designed to provoke connective thinking from student writers; it follows that a tutoring system meant to support the NHR's pedagogy would want to support connective thinking. One technique that can accomplish these goals is minimalist tutoring, a method that requires students to solve their own problems under the supervision of a tutor who acts as a coach, a more experienced peer, rather than an editor.

Though the strategies I discuss below were developed in the context of the writing center, teachers can employ them during office hours and class workshops with equal ease. However, teaching others to put them into practice is more complicated than it seems, not only because of student expectations, but because of tutor expectations as well. If, as Spellmeyer and Miller contend, the traditional humanities have emphasized mimetic over connective thinking, this emphasis manifests in the writing center as the student who wants to summarize the thoughts of other writers as the core activity of essay-writing, or who wants to rant on a topic related to class reading without entering into dialogue with that reading. In each case, the goal is to reproduce, in writing, a position the writer already knows, avoiding connective thinking entirely. A writer with either of these goals in mind will, upon entering tutoring for the first time, expect the tutor to correct their mimesis: to edit sentence-level error, add additional and superior content, correct interpretation of the readings, and so on. Many tutors--as expert practitioners of mimetic thinking--share these assumptions with their less-experienced counterparts, and expect to be trained to do the same things students expect them to do.

These expectations of mimesis pose a problem for writing center staff who wish to foster connective thinking in student writers, and require a disruption of expectations that has long been a goal of practitioners of minimalist tutoring. This concern is reflected in Jeff Brooks' essay "Minimalist Tutoring: Making the Student Do All the Work," when he describes the desire of both tutor and student for the traditional techniques of improvement:

When you "improve" a student's paper, you haven't been a tutor at all: you've been an editor. You may have been an exceedingly good editor, but you've been of little service to your student. I think most writing center tutors agree that we must not become editors for our students and that the goal of each tutoring session is learning, not a perfect paper. But faced with students who want us to "fix" their papers as well as our own desire to create "perfect" documents, we often find it easier and more satisfying to take charge, to muscle in on the student's paper, pen in hand. (2)

Brooks puts his finger on a student-tutor dynamic that can undermine the most sincere
efforts at minimalist tutoring. If a tutor has been trained to coach and not to edit, but then caves in to student demands for editing, the problem lies not only with the student, whose prior educational experience may entirely support the goal of mimetic thinking, but also with the tutor, whose desire to "muscle in" on student writing, to create a "perfect" paper, is also the product of experience and cultural training. Mimetic thinking and the desire to take control of student writing are both rooted, after all, in long-standing goals of the modern university to use knowledge to dominate both nature and human cultures more effectively. Therefore, in the face of student and tutor resistance to connective thinking and minimalist tutoring, writing center staff should remember that the powerful patterns of desire and reward undergirding such resistance cannot be quickly undone, no matter how effective the writing center's rhetoric may be. Rather, writing center staff must coordinate with writing program pedagogy and teacher-training to reveal the benefits of connective thinking, not only across the span of the semester, but throughout a larger undergraduate education.

The challenge of promoting connective thinking through tutoring begins with the tutors themselves. As undergraduates, graduate students, faculty members, or other members of the academic community, tutors are accomplished writers of academic prose, distinguished by their ability to enact, in their own work, the connective thinking required by The New Humanities Reader. But therein lies the danger: they must help other students to acquire skills like theirs without directly applying their own skills. As I have said to many tutors: "We've chosen you for your superior abilities as academic writers, but now we're going to ask you to set them aside." This is, initially, a shocking request. Don't students learn by imitating a good example? Aren't tutors meant to be that example? To these questions, we usually say yes, students learn by example, but they won't develop new skills merely by watching other people correct their grammatical errors, interpret their assignments, and write their arguments. Students do learn by imitation, but they should imitate the process of composition that more experienced writers often take for granted.

This claim, that students need to learn the process of more experienced writers, is often taken by beginning tutors to mean my students should copy my process. But the practice of an experienced writer cannot be directly translated into the practice of the beginning writer. This is because experienced writers often synthesize many steps of writing into a larger movement which seems not to have distinguishable parts. These larger movements often overwhelm the beginning writer and lead to paralysis. Therefore, the first thing a tutor must do, once the needs of the writer are identified, is to separate a long, fluid gesture into discrete blocks of action that will not overwhelm a beginner. This involves breaking down an intuitive process into component parts, remembering what composition was like before proficiency was attained. An excellent example of this challenge is the issue of the thesis statement.

Most students have been trained to write in the order of reading, from beginning to end. Because the thesis statement is the first thing to appear in a well-structured expository essay, tutors want to insist that students make a thesis first and then follow it through to the end of the paper. The traditional outline, with its Roman numerals and hierarchy of topics, reflects the structure that tutors want, so they ask students to outline their papers, beginning with the thesis statement. This strategy leads to writer's block for the beginner, however, because most beginners--and, indeed, many experienced writers--write their way into the paper, with the clearest and most useful ideas appearing at the end of the rough draft.

This strategy of writing to find out what you think, rather than knowing what you're going to say from the start, often produces a draft that looks like failure to a tutor, precisely because it cannot be poured into a traditional outline. Tutors often say things like "This writer has to find a thesis first, before he does anything else" when faced with this kind of draft. That position is, of course, a product of their own training, and probably reflects what writing teachers have said to them in the past, and may be difficult to dislodge. Nonetheless, we ask tutors to do the unintuitive thing and discard the expectation of a thesis as the first step in the process of writing. Instead, we ask them to work first in developing an argument, which can then later be reflected in a thesis statement. And this process of developing the argument must itself be broken into smaller steps for the student.

• For instance, if the student has been told, "Make an argument about genetically modified foods and human rights in dialogue with Michael Pollan and Martha Nussbaum," the tutor would ask the student to reread Pollan or Nussbaum, trying to identify passages to which she could respond. Then the tutor would get up and leave the student to do that task. Once the tutor sees that ten to twenty minutes have elapsed, or the student has ceased to work, she would return and ask the student about the passages he's found.
  
  
• If the student has not succeeded in finding passages that warrant response, the tutor might discuss how to find a passage that contains interesting and useful ideas and then again leave the student alone.
  
  
• If the student has succeeded in finding such passages, the tutor would then explain the next step: to paraphrase the content of the passage and then respond in dialogue with its ideas in the larger context of the assignment's question. Then the tutor walks away again. Returning to find that the student has both accurately paraphrased his Nussbaum passage--no mean task itself--and responded to it with a position on human rights and genetically modified foods, the tutor might have the student repeat the whole exercise with a quotation from Pollan, and finally put both exercises side by side, asking the writer to spend the final fifteen minutes of the period building a bridge between the Nussbaum and Pollan discussions.

The structure of the above tutoring session may puzzle the beginning tutor. It did not result in a thesis, or even a coherent argument, but in a series of positions taken towards bits of source text on the common ground of the assignment question. The student did not leave with a structure that could be poured into a linear outline, nor did she come close to finishing her paper in the span of one tutoring session.

If the student and the tutor were looking for a finished product or a completed process, they were sorely disappointed. But from the perspective of minimalist tutoring, which values small victories on the way to greater student skill and independence, the session was a great success. The student came out with more writing than she had when she arrived; she addressed the assignment question; she chose suitable quotations from the source texts and engaged in dialogue with them; and she left with more work to do in connecting the source texts with each other and her own position. In a process-centered model of tutoring, these are the desired results, and a session that produces all of them would be a great success. Therefore, tutors must be trained to see the success of a session in terms of small tasks of reading and writing that show a student how to break an intimidating job into more manageable parts.

This is not to say, however, that every tutoring session will produce as much as the one above. In my own experience, one session can sometimes be a matter of identifying a core problem and addressing it in a way that only begins to change a student's writing practice. I once had a student whose assignment included the idea of "the universe of discourse." He had already written a four-page draft that seemed to translate this key term from a source text as "things that people say." Skeptical of his understanding of the term, I handed him a dictionary and asked him to look up "discourse," which he dutifully did. Then I asked him to write a new definition of "universe of discourse" with this new information. Though he seemed to grasp the idea that discourse had to do with language, this advance in understanding a word in the phrase still had not made the phrase itself more understandable. I finally asked him to look up the word "universe" while I watched. Though he found the word in the dictionary, he then copied the definition above the entry rather than below it. Thus it became clear that his earlier protestations about using the dictionary had been true: he had simply been using it incorrectly.

Our entire session had been devoted to the discovery of this one fact, and otherwise produced nothing. But we had located the crucial impediment to his progress on his paper: faced with unfamiliar words in an unfamiliar combination, he had used the right tool in the wrong way, not only in this essay, but in every essay before it. Though our session accomplished much less than a beginning tutor might have desired, its small victory changed the course of the student's expository writing career in a way neither he nor I could have anticipated. It is this improvisational quality of minimalist tutoring which requires attention to the student and his problems at the moment of tutoring instead of some rigid notion of what a session should accomplish.

Because tutors improvise according to the needs of the student at the moment of tutoring, it's useful to have an array of strategies that can be arranged in different patterns according to circumstance. One of the most flexible techniques is called the Reverse or Post-Draft Outline. Unlike the traditional pre-draft outline, whose drawbacks have already been mentioned, the Post-Draft Outline works from a rough draft that already exists, and is useful for developing a coherent claim in each paragraph, transition sentence between paragraphs, a coherent flow of argument throughout the paper, and a thesis paragraph that accurately reflects the argument of the essay. It is especially helpful for the tutor who claims that "The paper is already good--there's nothing else for the student to do."

These are the basics:

• First, the tutor asks the writer to ignore the thesis statement and closing of the draft, if these, in fact, exist.
  
  
• Then the tutor asks the writer to take out a separate sheet of paper to write on--this will become the map of the draft's argument.
  
  
• Then the writer is asked to examine the first paragraph of the argument and summarize its claim in one or two sentences on the other piece of paper.
  
  
• The writer applies this technique to every paragraph of the argument until each one has been examined. (This first step usually takes a while, and is a good opportunity for the tutor to step away and allow the writer to work alone.)
  
  
• In the end, the writer will have a list of summarized claims on the second sheet of paper which reveals the real structure of the argument, rather than the structure the writer thought he was following at the beginning of the writing process.

At this point, the tutor can help the writer work on any number of important questions, depending on the content of the new outline.

For instance, the outline may reveal that certain paragraphs don't have a central claim, certain paragraphs do, and certain paragraphs have more than one. Though the writer may not have seen this while staring at the draft as a whole, the outline serves to make the skeleton of the argument visible. Once this happens, the tutor can help the writer find a claim in the claimless paragraphs, clarify existing claims, and split the paragraphs with more than one claim into several new paragraphs. Once this has been done, the tutor can ask the writer to return to the outline, write the new claims in, and turn to the question of the connections between each claim.

Many times, the connections between the claims of each paragraph are implicit in the writer's mind, but not expressed as transition sentences. This problem can be turned into another writing task by asking the writer to compose a sentence or two between claims that expresses their relationship or connection. This exercise often produces the first conscious understanding in the writer of what the essay is about. For students unused to constructing transition sentences, the tutor can then demonstrate how to integrate the new writing into the earlier draft to produce paragraphs that actually speak to each other, forming a whole for the reader as well as the writer. Once this has been accomplished, if there is time left in the tutoring session, the thesis paragraph can be revised. Beginning students in college composition classes are often shocked to learn that a thesis statement can be more than one sentence long, having been taught in some earlier context that the thesis must be brief.

Using the list of claims and the adjacent list of connections between them, the student can revise the thesis paragraph as a map or summary of the essay. If the Post-Draft Outline has been successful, most of the work of writing a thesis has already been accomplished in the earlier steps of revision: the writer can use the claim and transition sentences as the bulk of the thesis paragraph. This technique is especially helpful to students who have previous training in journalistic or creative writing, where the idea of a broad "introduction" is more familiar than a sharp, focused thesis.

The Post-Draft Outline is useful for students who are already in dialogue with the source texts, already able to take a position on some common ground with the readings. To other students, however, The New Humanities Reader will seem more intimidating, and the task of responding to its authors as an equal, entirely foreign. This problem will be especially acute for students who have been prevented in previous classes from taking a position of their own relative to class materials. If mimetic thinking was rewarded and connective thinking actively discouraged, students may know what they think but be afraid to express themselves. In more advanced cases, punishment for connective thinking may prevent students from recognizing that they have a position in the first place. In either situation, it is useful to ask the student to respond to an assignment out loud, with the tutor and the student both taking notes as the student discusses the readings in light of a central question.

Because most students have oral skills far in advance of their written skills, and are therefore more confident in the realm of speech, it often turns out that students can speak themselves into dialogue with a source text where they could not write themselves into it due to earlier training. Students in tutoring love to talk as a way of avoiding writing, so the tutor must be very careful to turn talking into writing as the next step in the process. This can be accomplished by comparing notes on what was said, identifying the most promising ideas and connections in the discussion, and proceeding into a writing exercise that organizes and clarifies the oral work. This transformation of student-tutor dialogue into a written dialogue between student, source texts, and assignment can be an effective way past many kinds of blocks, including those put in place by earlier instruction, but only if the tutor shows the student how to take the technique out of the writing center and into the world beyond tutoring. If a technique ultimately depends on the presence of the tutor, the student will not become a more skilled writer.

There is no end to the making of tutoring techniques, and this essay should serve as a beginning to that happy process. Ideally, tutors and other writing center staff should come together after working with The New Humanities Reader to discuss the techniques they have found useful in promoting connective thinking and writing among students. In this way, the small victories of individual tutors and students can inform the practice of an entire community.

Works Cited

Brooks, Jeff. "Minimalist Tutoring: Making the Student Do All the Work." Writing Lab Newsletter 15.6 (February 1991): 1-4.

Miller, Richard E. and Kurt Spellmeyer. "Introduction." The New Humanities Reader. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000. 11-20.

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