In past issues of Center Moves, we’ve invited submissions on a pair of topics, for example, navigating AI with writers and collaboratively setting agendas, the two topics of issue 3. This focused approach gave readers not only rich new plans to use and adapt but also choice within those topics, a chance to see how writing center directors and staff in quite different centers developed plans for their staffs and in their specific contexts.
In Issue 4, we’re doing something different. A wildcard issue––inviting any topic and resulting in unexpected thematic juxtapositions––allows us to invite submissions outside of those topics we’ve imagined so far. In this issue, we want readers (and ourselves) to learn about the diverse ways that other writing and learning center administrators approach tutor education, particularly in ways that might cross, or exceed, categorization. We feel that this open approach, which we hope to offer at least once every few issues, offers the potential for submissions that expand our teaching and training horizons.
This first wild-card issue includes a set of exciting plans featuring the work of writing center directors and staff members at five diverse institutions:
Bonnie Devet, Mary Carr, Morgan Kelly, and Bianca Cedillo Perez prepare consultants to build analogies for writing center consulting, drawing on traditional rhetorical concepts to learn––from themselves and each other––what the work of consulting means.
Elizabeth Gagne’ creates timely scaffolding for tutors to understand how and why tutoring is different from AI, and how tutors can engage their own intelligence alongside artificial intelligence to support writers.
Carolyne M. King and Megan Boeshart Burelle develop a set of three scaffolded lessons that support tutors’ and writers’ rhetorical reading, helping them develop more nuanced ways of understanding source use across the disciplines.
Michelle Marvin generates a workshop for tutors to develop more professional and personal tutor notes, helping them navigate and understand the genre and how they can communicate writing center values.
CharLee Toth and Michael Ennis produce a cross-training usable in writing centers and tutoring centers, helping tutors understand, apply, and adapt concepts from cognitive psychology to support and deepen their practice.
We hope the five plans collected here offer you new possibilities for teaching and training, and we invite you to submit a plan of your own to us for a future issue.
––Melody Denny, Erik Echols, Juli Parrish, Olivia Tracy, and Erin Zimmerman
Bonnie Devet, Mary Carr, Morgan Kelly, and Bianca Cedillo Perez, College of Charleston
A prime job of directors is to help consultants understand the nature of the work carried out in centers. A historical figure provides a way to encourage consultants to grasp what their assistance to clients entails. Winston Churchill (1897/2000), in his “The Scaffolding of Rhetoric,” stresses that a vivid, valid method to understand one’s world is through crafting an analogy: “Analogies can translate an established truth into simple language” and “can aspire to reveal the unknown.” Thus, an apt analogy brings together what seems to be different or even unknown in order to reveal a new truth. This lesson asks consultants to explore their work by constructing analogies, by comparing their perceptions to those expressed by other consultants, and by determining how accurately or inaccurately their analogy describes the center. By encouraging the process of crafting analogies and by reflecting on those analogies, the lesson reveals that consultants can learn from each other about what their jobs encompass.
The focus of this training activity is to showcase how AI can aid tutoring appointments and students' writing but cannot replace the humanistic, cognitive, and social perspectives that are present in writing center consultations. This activity helps to facilitate the examination of the types of feedback given, and specifically whether and how well AI feedback vs. consultant feedback addresses higher-order concerns. As we know, AI has the capability to help students in their drafting and revising process, but it doesn’t cater to the students' needs without being specifically prompted. How does the student know what their needs are if they don't have targeted feedback? This activity highlights the need for a collaborative and humanistic approach to giving and /receiving feedback. To utilize this lesson, directors will need to provide a common assignment seen in their university writing center (UWC) to the consultants and ensure for the consultants to have access to a GenAI tool of their choice.
Carolyne M. King and Megan Boeshart Burelle, Old Dominion University
This training series is designed to help writing tutors deepen their understanding of reading as a rhetorical skill, and to expand their recognition of reading and source use connections. It engages tutors in interactive activities, guided practice, and reflective discussions to develop tutors’ understanding of reading, genre, and source use, and to increase their comfort with working across disciplines and with advanced writers (e.g., writers in upper division courses and graduate writers).
This interactive workshop helps writing center tutors develop strategies for composing tutor notes (i.e., conference summaries, session reports, etc.) that reflect their authentic voice and the professionalism of the center, while keeping the focus on the tutee’s work. The training emphasizes documenting sessions in a reporter style without relying on AI for composition. During the workshop, tutors collaboratively analyze sample tutor notes and work through revision activities to practice writing clear, informative, audience-focused reports. The workshop offers practical strategies alongside reflection and prepares tutors to apply their new understanding in their next appointments. By the end of the workshop, tutors have a stronger grasp of an analytical structure and professional tone that characterizes “stellar” tutor notes: notes that effectively convey both what took place in the session and the values of the writing center.
This training plan focuses on equipping peer writing tutors with strategies grounded in cognitive psychology: in other words, the science of learning. Drawing from readings including Make It Stick (Brown et al., 2014) and Range (Epstein, 2019) the plan first encourages writing tutors to explore concepts such as retrieval practice, interleaving, and metacognition that improve memory and retention, and consider how to apply these concepts to writing center sessions. Second, the plan focuses on the specific concept of "kind" and "wicked" learning environments to prompt tutors to adapt their feedback techniques to these environments.
Participants engage with worksheets that link theoretical findings to writing center practices, helping them identify strategies to support students adapting to the demands of college-level writing. Materials include readings, two worksheets to guide activities for applying science of learning concepts to tutoring sessions, and tutor reflections. The training aims to enhance writing tutors' ability to provide actionable feedback, foster student independence, and collaborate across disciplines. Feedback from participants indicates that tutors value the emphasis on thinking about their own learning processes and strategies to improve student learning processes, reporting improved confidence and effectiveness in their tutoring approaches.
