Building Peer Tutoring Programs in Writing Centers
European Association of Teachers of Academic Writing
Bochum, Germany, June 30 - July 2, 2007
Paula GillespieMarquette University
/ Harvey Kail
University of Maine
THIS PACKET CONTAINS THE TASKS ASSIGNED TO FIVE WORKING GROUPS AT THE WORKSHOP, THE RESULTS OF THEIR DELIBERATIONS, A RESPONSE FROM WORKSHOP LEADERS TO EACH, AND A BIBLIOGRAPHY ASSEMBLED FOR EACH IMPORTANT COMPONENT IN BUILDING PEER TUTORING PROGRAMS IN WRITING CENTERS.
Resources for Starting
Peer Tutoring in Writing Centers
Gillespie, Paula and Neal Lerner. The Allyn and Bacon Guide to Peer Tutoring, 2nd edition. New York: Pearson/Longman, 2003.
Gillespie. Paula and Harvey Kail. "Crossing Thresholds: Starting a Peer Tutoring Program." The Writing Center Director's Resource Book, Ed. Christina Murphy and Byron Stay. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Earlbaum, 2006: 321-330.
---. "Tutor Training and Writing Centers in Europe: Extending the Cross-Cultural Dialogue." Writing Lab Newsletter 27.6 (February 2003), 5-8.
Gillespie, Paula, Bradley Hughes, and Harvey Kail. "Nothing Marginal About This Writing Center Experience. Marginal Words, Marginal Work? Tutoring the Academy in the Work of Writing Centers, Ed. William J. Macauley, Jr. and Nicholas Mauriello. Kresskill: Hampton Press, 2007.
Kail, Harvey. "Separation, Initiation, and Return: Tutor Training Manuals and Writing Center Lore." The Center Will Hold: Critical Perspectives on Writing Center Scholarship. Ed. Michael A. Pemberton and Joyce Kinkead. Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press, 2003: 74-95.
Kail, Harvey and Paula Gillespie. "Peer Tutoring Theory and Practice: an Importable Model?" Proceedings of the European Association for Teachers of Academic Writing Second Conference. CD Rom. Budapest: June 2003.
Kail, Harvey, Paula Gillespie, and Bradley Hughes. The Peer Writing Tutor Alumni Research Project. http://www,marquette.edu/writingcenter/PeerTutorAlumni
Page.htm.
Rationales for Peer Tutoring
Please take a moment to introduce yourselves.
Please select someone in your group to act as recorder. It is the recorder's job to take notes of your discussion and to speak for the group.
Someone other than the recorder, please read the following workshop instructions aloud:
1. What are the arguments for establishing a peer tutoring program at your institution? Working together, make a list of all the reasons you can for building a peer tutoring program.
2. Working collaboratively, try to decide which are the most important reasons, the least important.
3. What are the arguments against peer tutoring? List as many of these arguments as you can. Which arguments do you think are most important?
4. Weigh the two lists against each other and try to agree on a list of rationales for peer tutoring that takes into account the counter arguments from step three.
Results
*Note: the arguments are rhetorical; that is, they depend on the audience they are intended for and the purpose of making the arguments.
PROs
· There are vast numbers of students who need writing assistance, so it makes sense to train as many students as possible
· Cheaper than hiring and training professional consultants
· Equal level makes writers more inclined to listen.
· When writers read texts, their texts improve.
· Writers learn from the tutor to be a good reader.
· Because writers get response during the process, they learn more about how to develop a useful process.
· Writers get immediate feedback.
· Autonomy is enhanced. Writers take responsibility for their own learning.
· Possibly writers will get more flexibility from the tutor, optimizing the learning cycle.
· Writers develop oral communication abilities to discus texts, and oral abilities can help them write better.
· Closes cultural gaps because you can get a tutor from your own culture.
· An academic network develops across years or institutions for the students.
· The peer tutors have advantages, better employment etc.
· Peer tutors get a chance to revisit subjects.
· Writers can reconceptualize text to something more dynamic and empowered.
CONs
· Students don’t trust tutors.
· Teachers don’t trust tutors.
· We can’t pay them.
· Stability of tutors – they move on and graduate.
· Tutors might undercut writing experts.
· Will anybody have the time to be a tutor?
· Some might feel that a focus on writing would happen at the expense of content.
Paula and Harvey respond:
This is an amazingly complete set of pros and cons for peer tutoring. We'd like to unpack each of them, but we will contain ourselves! There are interesting things to be said about each rationale. We hope the bibliography for this section will prove useful for investigating the context of the task.
As to the arguments against peer tutoring, each seems to us significant and worth being mindful of. Have we seen peer tutors make mistakes? Yes. But so do professional tutors. Do we expect perfection? No. But we have seen tutors engage in a serious way with the ideas and writing of others that creates a synergistic kind of learning that happens in few other places.
We hope that everyone who is interested in this issue has the chance to look at the website on the Peer Writing Tutor Alumni Research Project [http://www.mu.edu/writingcenter/PeerTutorAlumniPage.htm ]. Material on this site further develops the idea that one important rationale for peer tutoring is the value for the student tutors themselves. Our former peer tutors tell us that training and working as a peer tutor is often a transforming experience for them. We think the advantages for the peer tutors is almost as important as the value for the students who are being tutored, and we point this out every chance we get!
We have found in our experience and research that students can and do earn trust from each other in palpable ways, and that a peer tutoring program adds to the status and value of writing center professionals and does not undercut writing experts. In short, we are also convinced that the benefits outweigh the difficulties and the risks.
Sources of arguments for (and against) peer tutoring:
Braeuer, Gerd. "The US Writing Center Model for High Schools Goes to Germany--and What is Coming Back." The Clearing House Special Issue: The Writing Center and Beyond. ed. by Pamela Childers. 80.2 (Nov./Dec. 2006): 95-100.
Bruffee, Kenneth. Collaborative Learning. Higher Education, Interdependence, and the Authority of Knowledge, 2nd. edition. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.
---. "Peer Tutoring and "the Conversation of Mankind.'" in Writing Centers: Theory and Administration, edited by Gary Olson. Urbana, Il: National Council of Teachers of English. 1984: 3-15."
Harbord, John. Minimalist Tutoring: An Exportable Model? Writing Lab Newsletter 28.4 (2003) 1-5.
Murphy, Christina. "On Not 'Bowling Alone' in the Writing Center, or Why Peer Tutoring is an Essential Community for Writers and for Higher Education." in The Writing Center Director's Resource Book. Ed. Christina Murphy and Byron Stay. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2006: 271-279.
Nichols, Pam. "A Snowball in Africa with a Chance of Flourishing." Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa. 10.2 (l998): 84-95.
Van Resnberg, Wilhelm. "The Discourse of Selfhood: Students Negotiating Their Academic Identities in a Writing Centre." Journal for Language Teaching 38/2 (2004): 216-228.
Kail, Harvey, Paula Gillespie, and Bradley Hughes. The Peer Writing Tutor Alumni Research Project. http://www,marquette.edu/writingcenter/PeerTutorAlumniPage/htm
Developing a Peer Tutoring Budget
Please take a moment to introduce yourselves.
Please select someone in your group to act as recorder. It is the recorder's job to take notes of your discussion and to speak for the group.
Someone other than the recorder, please read the following workshop instructions aloud:
How much will a peer tutoring program cost? What kind of budget and other sort of material support might you need to get a peer tutoring program started? The task for this group is to create such a budget and determine institutionally appropriate ways to fund it.
1. Working together, make a list of all the types of expenses and other costs of creating such a peer tutoring program. For instance, one type of expense might be compensation for the peer tutors. Another example might be the cost of training peer tutors. Make your list as complete as you can imagine it.
Now, try to determine the priority of each item. What is the most essential; what least? If you have to cut, what will go first?
2. Now that you have some idea of what items you might need, in your budget, how much would each actually cost? Again, working together, make an estimate of what you would need in funding or other kinds of support for each item in your budget.
3. What is the cost of your total budget? How might you fund this budget? Identify and list as many sources as possible within your institution or local context from which you might seek funding.
4 Assume that you get half of what you ask for. Can you still make the program happen? Why or why not?
Results
Budgets for institutions will vary widely, depending on what is needed: Would the budget have to pay for space, for furniture, computers, phones, carpeting, books, supplies? Would it need to pay administrator salaries? Would tutors be paid or would they work for a certificate and credit? But if there is no budget, there is no program, and administrators will ask how much the program will cost. We need to be ready with an answer that’s grounded in an understanding of our institutions. In the meantime, we propose a budget of $100,000!
Paula and Harvey respond:
We agree that budget is tied closely to how each institution accounts for costs. Budgets might vary widely depending on how a peer tutoring program is conceived. Some budgets might include professional and faculty salaries; in others these expenses are part of a larger unit. Our own budgetary experiences vary widely on this: Paula's Ott Memorial Writing Center has an endowment that realizes nearly $30,000 a year, but she uses the money to pay tutors, and if the need for tutoring increases, she is tied to this amount. Harvey's program is funded at $6,000 base budget, but he gets a lot of help from his English department for in kind contributions such as photocopying and supplies, and from other agencies on campus, such as student employment and from the central administration. However your institution funds new or existing programs, it is vital to struggle early on with the issues that building a budget involves, as difficult as they may be. An unrealistic budget marks you as a dreamer or a revolutionary! An underestimated budget marks you as an amateur! Budget organization is the tough part of the work, but no budget, no program.
Resources for Developing a Peer Tutoring Budget
Dornsrife, Robert S. "Initiating a Peer Tutoring Program in a University Writing Center." Administrative Problem Solving for Writing Programs and Writing Centers. Ed. Linda Myers-Breslin. NCTE, l999: 247-253.
Kail, Harvey. " Writing Center Work: An Ongoing Challenge." Writing Center Journal. 20.2 (Spring/Summer 2000): 25-28.
Houston, Linda A. Budgeting and Politics: Keeping the Writing Center Alive. Administrative Problem Solving for Writing Centers and Writing Programs. Ed.Linda Myers-Breslin. NCTE,1999: 112-121.
Schreiber. Evelyn. "Funding the Center Through a University Line." The Writing Center Director's Resource Book. Ed. by Christina Murphy and Byron L. Stay. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2006: 417-423.
Simpson, Jeanne. "Perceptions, Realities, and Possibilities: Central Administration and Writing Centers. Writing Center Perspectives. ed by Byron L Stay, Christina Murphy, and Eric Hobson. Emmitsburg, MD: IWCA Press, l995: 48-52.
Speck. Bruce W. "Managing Up; Philosophical and Financial Perspectives for Administrative Success." The Writing Center Director's Resource Book. Ed. Christina Murphy and Byron Stay. Lawrence Earlbaum, 2006. 215-223.
Training Peer Tutors
Please take a moment to introduce yourselves.
Please select someone in your group to act as recorder. It is the recorder's job to take notes of your discussion and to speak for the group.
Someone other than the recorder, please read the following workshop instructions aloud:
Assuming that your peer tutoring program had been approved,
1. Make a list together of the kinds of students who would benefit from or enjoy being peer tutors.
2. Discuss together: What would these students need to know in order to be good peer tutors? Make a list of the values and abilities students need to develop as peer tutors.
3. Discuss together: What is the best way to develop such a training program? Should it be a credit-bearing course, a workshop, an apprenticeship, or something else?
4. What are the problems associated with trying to establish a training program? Please describe.
Training Peer Tutors Results
Question one: Who might enjoy and benefit from taking part in peer tutoring?
Potentially all students, but clearly more conservative/ less flexible students may not like having their work challenged
Who might benefit from being a peer mentor?
· Students who are slightly more experienced and understand academic/ learning and teaching processes (practically this may mean that it would need to be students who have completed the first year)
· Mature students/ students with experience of life
· Students who have had to work at learning/ struggled a bit and are used to asking for help
· Students who like to write
· Students who are communicative
· Students who are enthusiastic
Question two: What do peer tutors need to know and what qualities do they need to possess?
Need to know
About the writing process
· Ethics, boundaries and where to send students for specialist support and help
· Some aspects of grammar
· Learning and basic facilitation strategies
· How to work collaboratively with students
Qualities
· Good listener
· Open and receptive
· Constructive and positive
· Willingness to experiment and even to fail
· Responsive and able to think on their feet
Question three: How would we develop the peer mentors?
Two stages:
Initial training
· Exploring the writing process and our assumptions about it