Assessing the Writing and the Writer Madison Kooba, University of Oregon abstractA central job of being a consultant is helping a writer understand what is and is not working well in their writing. This means that consultants have to develop skills to assess both pieces of writing and their writers, who come to sessions with varying writing experience and dispositions. In this asynchronous session, consultants start with a short reading, reflection, and video to learn about how developing rapport with writers shapes the session. They practice strategies to identify more and less successful elements in a piece of writing and to prioritize which are most important to address in a consultation. They conclude with a final brief video overviewing what this assessment process should look like when starting a consultation. Through this session, consultants examine hypothetical scenarios, pieces of writing, and assignment prompts to apply their learning and gain practice before working with actual writers. KEYWORDSIn-person tutoring Listening skills Rhetorical listening Writers’ identities Tutoring session logistics Global/ higher-order/ higher gravity concerns Sentence-level/ lower-order/ lower gravity concerns LESSON contextThis training, the first lesson that new consultants have after orientation, introduces the foundations of effective, developmental feedback for writers. It presents best practices for consultants in responding as readers and developing rapport with writers, practices that consultants experience in more depth in later lessons. Our definition of assessment is a foundation for establishing rapport with the writer and engaging in a scaffolded feedback process in which consultants are encouraged to meet writers where they are: what knowledge they have of the writing process, what strategies they understand and apply to their writing, and how they feel about themselves as writers. In many ways, our definition of assessment mirrors that of Brooks-Gillies and Smith (2023), who consider it an “everyday practice” (p.42) of the awareness of the various communities and cultures that writing centers operate in and engage with.
FORMAT TYPEAsynchronous online TIMING & OCCURRENCELesson Time: 1–2 hours Prep Time: 30 minutes Occurrence: Sequence (a training that is part of a larger scaffolded activity) Timeline: New tutor orientation (located early in the first term of new tutors’ employment) Training Type: asynchronous TUTOR AUDIENCENovice tutors Undergraduate student tutors Graduate student tutors In-person tutors MATERIALS NEEDED
Note: Both "Assessing the Writing" and "Improv-ing the Consultation" materials are used with permission by the UNLV Writing Center (2023) and can be used to create videos to caption and embed as part of this asynchronous training module.
AUTHOR INFORMATIONMadison Kooba, University of Oregonkooba@uoregon.edu Madison Kooba is a first-year English PhD student at the University of Oregon. She received her MA in English from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where she worked as a writing center tutor and admin. She is primarily interested in gender and sexuality in comics and pop culture and enjoys her current position teaching composition and mentoring students. |
