On Wednesday, October 14, SSWCA offered the digital roundtable Online Tutoring for Directors and Tutors. It was hosted by Seth Czarnecki of Algonquin Regional High School in Massachusetts and Lauren Wilkie of Solorio High School in Illinois along with our SSWCA Tutor Representatives Sarah Oburu and Nikko Curtis. A summary of the discussion is posted here.
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.
How are you building community between tutors, between tutors and other students, between yourself and your staff?
- In years past, it may have been easier to do this: we could meet with our tutors in the hallway, after school, in between sessions. Now, it is much more difficult to do this.
- Centers have found success in finding alternative spaces to tutor, such as in unused wings of buildings, outside, or utilizing asynchronous/synchronous platforms.
- Centers have developed “team” or “committees” of students to establish connections within tutoring centers with large numbers of mentors. These teams, responsible for areas like marketing, online tutoring, fundraising, tutoring training, etc. are run by students and report to the directors. Functioning much like an organizational pyramid, those “Heads of the Family” or “Head Tutors” facilitate a bridge between director and tutors in disseminating information, making decisions, communicating, and building community.
- Some centers are highlighting mentors, such as by way of social media posters, to not only advertise the center, but also acknowledge the community of the writing center while virtually learning and mentoring.
In what ways have you been successful (or unsuccessful) marketing and promoting your virtual center?
- Marketing has proved challenging with ever-changing school attendance policies and restrictions.
- Some ideas that have been successful were the following: advertising through English and World Languages courses; developing partnerships/rent-a-mentor with other classes; putting the center’s link in staff email signatures; having the center’s appointment website open up automatically on school-issued devices; developing specialized workshops or tutoring sessions, such as Athletes Tutoring Athletes or college personal statement writing; and making a Google Slide to give to all teachers to put in their weekly slide deck.
How are you ensuring quality in your tutoring sessions?
- The consensus was that we want to ensure that students’ social emotional needs were taken care of as a priority given the pandemic and the obvious stress all members of our school communities are feeling.
- Some suggestions for ensuring that students were giving quality feedback was that all asynchronous paper submissions were sent to the same writing center email that is moderated by the director.
- Additionally, centers can have group feedback sessions, similar to student work protocols, where there is a head tutor and “whisper tutors”. Head tutors are the ones who type the feedback in the actual document, but the other tutors give feedback collaboratively, providing multiple perspectives. Similarly, having students analyze + give feedback to the feedback helps “norm” expectations.
Finally, there were some other not-topic-specific ideas raised:
- Give your tutors a chance to vent it out when they come in. A center director expressed the benefit of having her tutors take 5 minutes at the start of tutoring to get out what they need to in order to be present and ready to work. This could also be implemented virtually.
- Many centers expressed feeling stretched thin with tutoring availability, a change in the amount and type of writing happening in virtual classrooms, and how writing centers might change, in terms of purpose and appearance, in the future.
SSWCA would like to thank everyone who attended this discussion and shared their ideas. A special thanks to the digital roundtable hosts, Seth Czarnecki, Lauren Wilkie, Sarah Oburu and Nikko Curtis for their leadership. If you have questions, you may contact sswca.board@gmail.com