Teacher Resources: Things That Work

MEETING IN YOUR OFFICE
by Ann Dean

 When a student comes to your office hour for help, it can be frustrating.  Often teachers will have great conversations with students and feel good about where the paper could go.  Then the next draft will have no revisions, or the student will seem to have forgotten what the conversation in the office was about.  In order to use office hours better, I have started using the same principles tutors use in the Writing Centers.  We call this "Minimalist Tutoring."  The central idea is that the tutor should be less active than the student.  In other words, when a student comes to your office, ask HIM to read and write, rather than reading and writing for him.  Here are some specific ways to do this: 

Ask the student to find the most important passage in the reading and make a list of all the words, phrases, and ideas in it she does not understand.  Then get out a dictionary for the difficult  words and point out sentence constructions like "if. . .then" or "because. . ."  Then have the student put the new version of the passage into her own words. THEN, ask the student what she just did and how she did it.  Ask her if she could do it at home, if you were not there, with another passage.  And tell her that to improve her papers she needs to do that with EVERY quotation in her paper. 

Ask the student to find the weakest paragraph in her paper (they can often do this).  Ask her what is wrong with it.  She might say that she wrote it just because she ran out of things to say but the paper wasn't long enough, or a variety of other things. 

If you think the paragraph has potential, suggest a revision strategy.  Ask her to write about her idea about the ideas in the paragraph.  Ask her to find a quotation and insert it.  Ask her to circle every important word or idea in a quotation and write about each one. Have her do this right there in your office (you can go get a soda or grade another paper).  Then talk about how the paragraph is better or worse. 

If you don't think the paragraph has potential, ask the student to find the best paragraph in the paper, and work on expanding it.  The student can write endings to sentences like "This idea is important because. . ." "This idea would be important to the authors of the readings because. . ." "This idea is confusing because. . ." "Someone who would be interested in this idea is. . ."  This way she can practice working with implications and suggestions. 
THEN, ask the student what she just did and how she did it.  Ask her if she could do it at home, if you were not there, with another passage.  And tell her that to improve her papers she needs to do that with EVERY paragraph in her paper. 

You can come up with your own strategies.  Think about what you do when you read, write, and revise, and ask students to do those things in your office.  That way they can see what it feels like to read, write, and revise in new ways.