LEARNING OUTCOMES/OBJECTIVES

By the end of the sequence, consultants will be able to:

MATERIALS NEEDED (LINK ALL)

INSTRUCTIONAL PLAN

Most of the training plan below is intended to be directly used or adapted by writing center staff. Except for the training map and the conclusion section, all text is addressed directly to consultants and intended to be read and interacted with as consultants move through the four parts of the training. To prepare this training, we invite writing center staff to create their own versions of the videos, using the provided scripts, and adapt our written language to their own contexts.

Training Map

Introduction: Purpose and Goals

A central job in consulting 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 experience and dispositions. In this asynchronous session, you will learn the difference between assessment and evaluation, and you will understand what it means to respond to writing as an aware and intentional reader. Part of this involves learning to ask about and consider a writer’s background, habits, attitudes, and beliefs about writing and how all of those factors can impact the writing process, their feelings about themselves as a writer, and the things they do or don’t struggle with.

Many writers might not be used to this degree of attention being paid to their work and might not understand how their habits, attitudes, and beliefs impact their writing or why you ask about them. This is why building rapport with a writer is necessary: it’s the first step of a scaffolded process where you ease a writer into being comfortable sharing their thoughts about their writing with you, which in turn allows you to engage in deeper discussion and offer meaningful feedback rather than line-editing or listing perceived faults.

Throughout this process, you try not to overwhelm writers with expectations for engagement outside of their capacity; rather you establish the consultation as “a collaboration towards a shared goal” (Nordlof, 2014, p. 57) in which you help writers internalize certain tasks, goals, and knowledge, adapting your feedback in response.

In the four parts of this asynchronous session, you will first learn about the importance of developing rapport with a writer and will see how that shapes a session. You will then learn strategies to identify more and less successful features of a piece of writing and to prioritize which are most important to cover in a consultation.

Through this session, you will examine hypothetical scenarios, pieces of writing, and assignment prompts to apply their learning and gain practice before working with an actual writer.

Part 1. Examining what We Bring to the Assessment (25 mins)

Reading and Reflecting on Harris’s “Diagnosis for Teaching One-to-One” 

At the heart of consulting with writers is the act of assessing what is happening in a writer’s writing as well as what a particular writer is bringing to the consultation. This act of assessment is where we begin our lesson. 

To get started, we draw on Teaching One-to-One: The Writing Conference in which the author, Muriel Harris, offers a theoretical framework for conference teaching, describes activities typical of and central to writing conferences, and offers advice on diagnostic and tutoring strategies for individualized instruction.

First, read a short excerpt of Harris’s chapter, “Diagnosis for Teaching One-to-One.” (2015, pp. 79-81). This excerpt defines diagnosis and asks you to consider what the teacher (or in our case, the consultant) brings to the act of diagnosis––or as we refer to it, assessment.

After you complete the reading, write a short reflection detailing some of what it is you bring to your consulting. In this reflection, please answer the following question: What evaluation criteria, teaching methods and styles, and composing styles are you bringing with you to the Writing Center? If it’s helpful, look back at the examples and questions posed by Harris in the reading to inspire your thoughts. This reflection portion should take approximately 20 mins.

Part 2. Overviewing and Practicing Assessing the Writing (50 min)

Video: Assessing the Writing

We have mentioned the process of assessment and the necessity of assessing a writer’s needs in the previous asynchronous training––assessment is one of the central skills you develop and apply in a consultation. This video shares why assessment is so important, help you develop more assessing skills, and reflect on the ones you already have. After you watch this video, you will complete two activities to begin to apply your learning. 

Activity #1: Prioritize your assessment (15 min)

Provided below is a list of different aspects of writing. Please take about 15 minutes to:

1. Review and add any other elements of writing you can think of to the list
2. Label each element as a global or sentence-level concern
3. Reorganize the list in the order in which you believe it is typically most useful to address these when examining a piece of writing.

• Fulfills the assignment prompt
• Demonstrates understanding of course texts/materials
• Conveys clear main ideas
• Includes grammatical errors
• Appropriately and sufficiently uses evidence to support the main ideas
• Includes punctuation errors
• Includes transitions between sections
• The style matches the genre
• Sentence or word problems interfere with clarity
• Includes an introduction that effectively signals the topic, scope, and organization of the paper
• Effectively organizes the sequence of ideas
• Includes word choice issues
• Adequately develops and explains the ideas
• Incorporates source material effectively

Please submit your reordered list and continue to the next page when complete.

Activity #2: Assess the writing (30 mins)

In this second activity, we want you to look at Omar’s paper and imagine working with him in a consultation.

This will be the first time you work with a text “written by” Omar, a writer we have created for this training. We will ask you to return to him as a writer later in this asynchronous session.

As you assess the writing, use what you have learned so far to consider what you would pay attention to in Omar’s text and prioritize your concerns. Please articulate your answers to the following questions:

• What are the strengths and weaknesses of Omar’s writing? Especially consider the points from the video, including how he addressed the rhetorical situation.
• How is Omar being attentive to the rhetorical situation? 
• What of those observations are global or sentence-level concerns? 
• Using all of that information, what would you prioritize working on with Omar?
• What questions would you want to ask Omar to better understand something in his writing?
• How much do you expect to be able to realistically cover with Omar in 45 minutes?

This activity should take approximately 25 minutes to complete. When you are done, proceed to Part 3.

Part 3. The Importance of Assignment Prompts (30 mins)

Activity #3: Locating Expectations in the Assignment Prompt

Ideally you found a variety of things you would want to cover with Omar in his consultation. As you worked, you probably wished that you had more information about the assignment: what Omar is trying to achieve, what the professor expected, and even what the genre is. We purposely did not give you the assignment prompt upfront in the hopes that you would struggle a bit. Why? Because we want to reinforce how important it is in your consultation to review the prompt with the writer.

Novice writers sometimes believe that all writing projects are exactly the same: that they should write the same way for all writing tasks and that all audiences are looking for the same things in the final product. We know that’s not the case. It’s vital for a writer to know why they are writing, what they are trying to achieve, what their audience knows and is looking for, and what the genre conventions call for. 

As consultants, we need to have the assignment prompt in order to learn those things. We can’t give informed advice without knowing the criteria and expectations that the writer needs to meet. In other words, having the assignment prompt can make your job easier. You don’t have to guess about what the writer needs to do; instead, you can point directly to what the assignment prompt indicates the instructor expects.

• What we would like you to do next is review this assignment prompt. As you look over it, re-consider your assessment of Omar’s paper:
• How does the information in the assignment prompt impact what you would prioritize in the consultation?
• What, if any, changes would you make to your consultation plan now?
• Do you feel more confident in your assessment of Omar’s writing now? Why/why not?

This task should take no more than 20 minutes to complete.

We have mentioned how important the assignment prompt is to you as a consultant, but remember also that your central goal is to instruct the writer. This means that it is often important for you to talk about the prompt with them. For instance, if the writer doesn’t realize that there is a specific context for the writing task, discussing the purpose of this assignment in relation to other tasks can help them be better prepared for this assignment as well as for future assignments. 

We sometimes see writers who have not attended closely to the assignment prompt. (We have found that the primary concern that most instructors have with student papers is that the final draft doesn’t meet some aspect of the prompt.) Helping writers learn how to break down the prompt to identify where they are or are not fulfilling expectations can help them consider the decisions they have made and look ahead to their next steps.

Part 4. Improv-ing the Consultation (10 min)

Video: Improv-ing the Consultation

You should now have a sense of what assessment looks like––but how do you actually start that process in the consultation? Beginning the consultation can sound easy, but many consultants struggle in their first few sessions to remember when to do what or how to present themselves confidently to their writers. It can be difficult to get into a rhythm that makes you feel comfortable.

The second video in this sequence walks you through the key components of a consultation’s beginning, from how you can greet the writer and bring them into the consultation room to how to assess their needs and set an agenda for the session. You will learn about the importance of developing rapport with the writer and will see how this process shapes the session.

As you watch this video, you might want to take notes and begin to envision the exact language that you can use to build your confidence and meet expectations.

Conclusion and discussion

Later lessons in the sequence specify how to appropriately ask about writers’ needs and goals, resist making assumptions about how writers will respond, and better understand how these factors can impact the writing. The second video we ask consultants to watch at the end of this lesson begins to model that by providing guidelines for how to use the start of the session to build rapport, ask the writer how their day is going, their feelings about the assignment, and what the consultant can help them with that session.
Depending on the structure of your own training, you can choose to highlight different strategies for consultants in these situations.

We explain how this can help orient consultants to the writer’s specific needs and goals and can give them direction for how to lead the session. By taking time to ask the writer some questions about themselves and their day, consultants can learn if a writer is having a particularly bad day, is overwhelmed, has a lot going on in their life, or is anxious about sharing their writing, for example. Learning information such as this can indicate to the consultant that they should spend more time in this beginning stage building rapport with the writer to help them feel comfortable enough engaging with the consultant and the consultation itself; it can also signal to the consultant that they may need to give more motivational feedback (in our training, we have a later lesson that focuses on different types of feedback, such as cognitive, instructional, and motivational).

ASSESSING FOR UNDERSTANDING

After this asynchronous training, we meet synchronously with consultants to review the main concepts from the asynchronous training and give them hands-on practice in applying them. We begin with whole-group discussion among the consultants on their takeaways from the Harris reading: what surprised them, resonated with them, confused them, and engaged them in thinking differently about what it meant to be a consultant.

We then pair new and experienced consultants and ask them to play-act the beginning of a consultation. New consultants practice greeting, setting the agenda, and beginning assessment with experienced consultants who roleplay as Omar, the writer whose assignment and prompt the new consultants worked with in the asynchronous training. The experienced consultants talk through the roleplay with the new consultants once it is complete and offer advice and feedback on how it went.

This activity allows us to see where beginning consultants are struggling and excelling at; provides space for individualized guidance; and gives consultants time to try out different approaches to find what they’re comfortable with before working with a scheduled writer.

EXTENSIONS AND ADAPTATIONS

RESOURCES and REFERENCES

Brooks-Gillies, M., & Smith, T. (2023). Everyday assessment practices in writing centers: A cultural rhetorics approach. Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, 21(1): 42–53. https://www.praxisuwc.com/211-brooksgillies-and-smith

Dartmouth Institute for Writing and Rhetoric. (2025). Diagnosing and responding to student writing. https://writing.dartmouth.edu/teaching/first-year-writing-pedagogies-methods-design/diagnosing-and-responding-student-writing

Harris, M. (2015). Teaching one-to-one: The writing conference. The WAC Clearinghouse. https://wac.colostate.edu/books/landmarks/harris/

Mackiewicz, J., & Thompson, I. (2013). Motivational scaffolding, politeness, and writing center tutoring. The Writing Center Journal, 33(1): 38–73. https://doi.org/10.7771/2832-9414.1756

Nordlof, J. (2014). Vygotsky, scaffolding, and the role of theory in writing center work. The Writing Center Journal, 34(1): 45–64. https://doi.org/10.7771/2832-9414.1785

Puntambekar, S., & Hubscher, S. (2005). Tools for scaffolding students in a complex learning environment: What have we gained and what have we missed? Educational Psychologist, 40(1): 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15326985ep4001_1

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Interaction between learning and development. In M. Cole, V. Jolm-Steiner, S. Scribner, and E. Souberman (Eds.), Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Harvard University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvjf9vz4