On Thursday, September 17, from 6 – 7 p. m., SSWCA offered the Digital Roundtable: Tutor Training in a Virtual Setting, hosted by Director Vivian Blair and Tutor Nikko Curtis. The conversation centered around the marked differences between previous years’ in-person tutor training and hosting these trainings during the pandemic in a virtual or hybrid environment. We discussed useful technology, how to incorporate new tutors and build community within the tutoring staff, lost resources and ideas for replacing those resources digitally, and a variety of other concerns connected with opening writing centers in remote learning situations.
We invite you to join us at future digital roundtables. Members attend for free and non-members can participate for a modest fee. Check out our upcoming topics and register here.
What are your plans for hosting a virtual or hybrid training session for your tutors?
Schools are functioning in a variety of ways: in-person, virtual, and hybrid. In those formats, training is happening through
- specific writing courses
- small groups after school
- using an on-the-job training model that pairs veteran tutors with inexperienced tutors.
One school hosted an all-day hybrid retreat, with students excused from classes to participate in training. Due to space and safety constraints, the retreat was hosted in three locations on campus simultaneously, with veteran tutors working in pairs or threes to lead the training, following a time-frame specific agenda used by all locations.
What technology do you plan to use, and how will you use it?
Some software and platforms that have been used successfully:
- Google Drive – shared folder for tutors with all training items–documents and videos
- Google Classroom & Google Forms – for appointments and training documents
- PPTX/Google Slides – for training documents and shared information
- Jamboard
- Flipgrid/WeVideo/Screencastify – to create videos for training, such as how to make an appointment, what a writing session looks like, how to complete Client Report Forms, enter schedule into WCOnline, use the synchronous session feature in WCOnline, etc.
- WCOnline – scheduling appointments, tutor schedule availability, creating reports, hosting synchronous sessions
- Other suggested resources: The Longman Guide to Peer Tutoring (specifically Chapter 3 for how to organize a tutoring session) and Create Your School Library Writing Center by Timothy Horan
What are your training priorities? Are those different from previous years?
- Preparing tutors for virtual sessions is vastly different from previous years! Just accomplishing the training is the predominant priority.
How will you keep tutors engaged? Look at these great ideas!
- Improv games
- Host an “all Coaches” meeting
- Veteran staff paired to co-author articles for a digital training publication
- New staff members are planning an open mic/poetry reading to publicize the writing center and generate interest and good will
- 30-second Flipgrid video selfies; Tutors watch and then play a Kahoot! Trivia get-to-know-you game
- New tutors will generate writing in response to a prompt and then participate in a conference as a writer with a veteran tutor; New tutors will then write a reflection of the experience as part of the learning.
- Host a Words with Friends tournament
- Pumpkin carving contest
What resources have your tutors lost? Clients? How will that affect their meets, and what can you use as a replacement?
- MLA Handbook, 8th Edition – replaced with Purdue Owl, an online source, and other resources in shared files
- Hard copies of Client Report Form (for note-taking during sessions) – replaced with a Google doc template in shared files
- Clients have lost physical, walk-in accessibility – replaced with tutors on duty for virtual walk-ins
Are there any questions or concerns you may have?
- Publicity/marketing of writing center to virtual student body
- Video vignettes spliced into the weekly community meeting and/or newsletter
- Flipgrid announcements
- Information posted on school-wide learning platforms (Google Classroom, Teams, Haiku, etc.)
- Videos for daily/Chapel announcements
- Students scheduling appointments at times tutors are not available
- Emailing students when receive appointment requests at unavailable times
- Post availability/hours on school-wide learning platform
SSWCA would like to thank everyone who attended this discussion and shared their ideas. A special thanks to the digital roundtable hosts, Vivian Blair and Nikko Curtis from Episcopal Collegiate School in Arkansas for their leadership. If you have questions, you may contact the hosts or sswca.board@gmail.com