We are excited to offer more resources for new and established centers by proving the following key Digital Resources below. View, download, adjust, and share as benefit your center and our larger community. These resources come from The Toolkit: Writing Center Resources for Middle and High Schools edited by Stacey Hahn and Renee Brown. In addition to the resources below, The Toolkit offers a detailed look at the labor of secondary center directors, guiding questions, discussions from experienced directors around the country, and 300+ additional resources. It is avaliable for a discounted member price here and on Amazon. Scroll to the bottom of this page for a complete table of contents from The Toolkit.
To assist with resource use, each has a short contextualization paragraph to explain what, why, and how. Resources are most effective when personalized to each center’s needs.
Whether drafted by directors, student tutors, or with the input of staff, a mission or values statement is key. These will guide future decisions and represent your center to students, staff, and parents. Mission statements typically outline what the center aims to achieve and how it intends to serve its community. For mission statements, what do you hope to accomplish as a result of your efforts? For whose specific benefit does the organization exist? Values statements, on the other hand, clearly articulate the guiding principles at the core of the center. They should be the deeply held beliefs which serve as the north star of the organization. For values statements, what are the core values or beliefs that inform your work? Once you have answers to these questions, you can write a statement that provides not only direction but also rejuvenation. The values statement below not only provides values and beliefs but also examples for what these principles look like in practice.
The following samples show the types of information you want to include, showcasing your research and thorough planning. Although you might not include these in your proposal, brainstorm all possible objections and be ready with solutions. You can also adapt this to share with fellow teachers, students, the school board, and the community-at-large. Getting more people invested in your center will increase its success. This proposal is straight to the point, which can be effective for busy administrators. It offers a snapshot of the logistics for and benefits of starting a writing center, and it even addresses possible concerns and solutions.
Just as writers must be aware of their audience, while proposing a new center you must know your audience and present your plans accordingly. Administrators, staff, and interested community members might respond better to the visual aspects of a powerpoint. It is a time-tested presentation tool although other programs like Prezi and Keynote also work great. When working with a co-director or needing easier sharing capabilities, consider Google Slides. A handout to go with your presentation can further provide takeaway information as well as a place to take notes. The sample above shows various areas to highlight when presenting.
As schools will not always have funding sources for a writing center, grants are an excellent option to explore. Check for grants from your local school district and community organizations as well as larger corporations and foundations. The following artifacts are examples of typical sections of a grant application. Other sections include number of students/staff involved, connection to/enhancement of current curriculum, implementation timeline, sustainability beyond the grant cycle and internal evaluation. Read your grant carefully to tailor answers to both your school and center. Depending on your funding needs, breaking down items into different grants (e.g., computers, furniture, conferences) can help cover a larger budget, especially when furnishing a writing center in its first year(s). This grant proposal was written for a new secondary school writing center in 2016. It outlines why the center should be funded and provides budget line items for furniture to fill its space.
A tutor handbook is an outline of your center’s policies and expectations. It should be tailored to your center’s mission and standards, and it helps to create and maintain your center’s culture. The handbook should be a living document, revised periodically to reflect changes in your center and school community.
There should be clear procedures for how a student signs up for a tutoring appointment. Some centers use a paper sign-up that hangs outside of the center, whereas other centers choose other methods, such as online tools (WC Online, GoogleForms, etc.) This paper sign-up sheet was posted outside of this writing center’s room. The top section of the sheet (date and tutors available) would be completed prior to posting on the bulletin board. The bottom section allows writers to sign up for a particular time-slot after school and to provide more information such as the assignment, course, their grade level, and (optionally) a request to work with a particular tutor. There is also a wait-list space at the bottom that the center would try to accommodate when possible (for example, if there was a no-show, or if there were extra tutors on hand).
Because there are bound to be certain times when at least some tutors are not actively tutoring, many centers determine particular activities that they want tutors to be working on during those times. In this learning center, this in-house tutoring brainstorm sheetis a tool used to help tutors consider one specific way they can utilize their down-time: get tutored by one of their colleagues. This is especially helpful during slow times in the writing center. This resource can easily be adapted to a writing center context by changing the questions to focus primarily on writing tasks (e.g., conducting research for a paper/presentation, drafting an outline, revising a draft).
If you choose an open application process (and many centers do), you might consider requiring candidates to ask a teacher of their choice to submit an easy-to-complete recommendation form. Try to make the recommendation form simple enough that teachers will fill it out. Make the recommendation confidential, so teachers don’t feel like they must rate the student well. Some centers create a digital form that students can send to their teachers. Alternatively, you can ask teachers to return the form to you in person or to a school mailbox.
New tutor applications sometimes require prospective tutors to submit a written or digital application (sample questions below), a work sample, and/or a teacher recommendation either in the form of a nomination or a recommendation form (see resources above). Ideally, the application will give you a sense of the student’s reasons for wanting to become a tutor, their involvement in activities outside of school, their attitudes about tutoring, and their academic abilities. The application should be short enough that students aren’t overwhelmed, but detailed enough to provide the basic information you need to help you make a decision. Using an online form will help keep applications organized and easily accessible. A good way to get applications to students is to create a QR code that is posted where students can access it (e.g., school announcements, posters outside your center, recruitment letters, etc.). In addition to the questions below, collect the applicant’s name, contact information, and interview availability if you choose to conduct interviews. Paper applications are easy to distribute to prospective tutors, while digital applications can be posted on social media and websites and eliminate the extra step of having to enter any information into a spreadsheet. For each response, you may choose to give students a suggested length of 150-250 words, or you can simply evaluate the prospective tutor based on how thoroughly they respond without guidelines.
As you establish your center, you may want to select student leaders who can help with mentoring new tutors, developing training, and/or day-to-day operations. Student leaders should exhibit the characteristics of tutors and be ambitious, cordial, and organized. Many directors select their leaders mid-year for the following year, so the new leaders can learn from the current group. This resource has some suggested application questions for student leaders or student managers.
A reference guide to support novice and veteran tutors is a practical tool for use during sessions. It also serves as a source of topics for ongoing or refresher training or even workshops to offer to the school community.
The resource, “Guidelines for Consultations,” was shared with one center’s tutors as part of their tutor handbook and demonstrates the consistent expectations for how a tutoring session will proceed in the center— very useful for new tutors, or new co-directors. In addition to offering pedagogical tips with example phrases, it includes logistical factors such as keeping track of time, filling out the session form, and how to open and close the conversation. The steps you decide to include in your tutoring procedures will depend on the mission of your center, the age of your students, the length of your tutoring session, and a range of other local factors.
Using case studies is a great way to train tutors for working with a diverse student population. Whether talking through what a client might be feeling or how a report works, these sample pieces allow you to go beyond role playing of how a session works and start fine-tuning tutoring skills. Another way to use case studies are on hypothetical report forms. Tutors could respond with a partner or in small groups to sample session notes and complete the Attitude, Work, Strategies, and Impact exercise below. Note that this uses case studies to train students on filling out a report form.
From the beginning, tutors need to know what the expectations are for the center and themselves as tutor leaders. Consider sharing the history of the center with new tutors and working together to create goals and expectations for the current school year. The sample here provides sections from tutor training course syllabi. The tutor training class syllabus is from a school that also calls their course Advanced Composition. This example is unique in that it delineates the differences between three separate sections of the course for tutors with different levels of experience. It contains a conversational and welcoming tone. Additionally, it clearly communicates the expectations of these courses to students, from their roles as tutors, to assignments, to grades. This syllabus also aligns the course with state standards.
This artifact is given as asynchronous coursework for new tutors over their first semester to reinforce tutoring skills; however, it could work very nicely in a tutor training course. This project has students researching a topic with the goal of helping the writing community at large. The final project is meant to help them find a leadership role and voice as a writing role model in the community, so students select a way to demonstrate that leadership through a workshop, resource or participation in the SSWCA conference. This artifact provides useful step-by-step instructions for the project.
If you have returning tutors for two or three years, you may find that keeping them motivated and providing opportunities for growth becomes more difficult. This tutor training document requires tutors to complete certain tasks (bold), and then to choose four additional tasks that they highlight and submit as part of a graded course.
A great practice is to supply writing tutors with a tips list or list of to-dos. Tutoring online can be especially distracting, and such documents are helpful in keeping all students focused on the task at hand. Your tip sheet may be one or several pages. Either way, include information that your tutors need, and seek their feedback about what is most helpful to include. You’ll see that directors are considering both synchronous and asynchronous work in these artifacts. While many of the practices overlap with traditional tutoring, directors with online tutoring also have to consider training tutors for their awareness of tone. This document contains two different examples that you will find helpful.
The application for a learning center should look at all aspects of the potential tutor’s academic experience and ability. However, this does not mean that an applicant needs to excel in all subjects in order to be a tutor. Consider who applies and what your center needs. Regardless, it is recommended that the application contain: 1.) Academic History, 2.) Short Answer, and 3.) Teacher Recommendation. It’s the director’s preference on how applicant information is collected. These questions work just as well as in Google Form as they do on a hard-copy, paper application. This application focuses on prospective tutors identifying their academic strengths and weaknesses. The short answer portion is broken up into two sections: 1.) personal statement and 2.) tutoring scenario. Although the tutoring scenarios in this application focus on humanities and science, you can modify the subject-specific scenarios based on your school’s needs – ESOL, world language, or other high priority areas.
If you are running peer tutoring as a course instead of a club, chances are you will need to put together a syllabus. It can be difficult to come up with specific language for your syllabus when the work you do in class is so broad. Here is a sample course description, standards, and grading breakdown for a peer tutoring course.
This is a one-page sample course overview that can be added to your syllabus if you are teaching multiple levels of peer tutoring within one class. It is different from the course description in that it specifically states the center’s location and schedule, and it differentiates among the responsibilities for the different levels of tutors. It is recommended that both tutors and parents sign and return a copy of the course overview so that all involved in peer tutoring have the same information. The signed hard copy is kept in the classroom for the duration of the year and an unsigned electronic version is posted online.
This activity is a multi-step project that tutors can work on over the course of the school year. The purpose of the liaison’s project is to build and maintain relationships between teachers and the peer tutoring center in order to increase awareness and to build-up the center’s collection of resources in order to better serve students. Each tutor is given one course for which he or she will be the liaison. They will spend the year “liaising” with the teacher (usually the grade level team leader) to communicate about what the peer tutoring center can offer. It is helpful to begin this activity with a review of the materials the center already has and with an interview of the teacher for that course. Once the initial interview is done, other activities throughout the year, in addition to the monthly check-in emails, can include student interviews, academic article review, tutoring resource creation, tutor training lesson, creating a binder full of resources, or a final exam review.
This resource provides steps for tutors to follow as they conduct tutoring sessions. It can be used when training tutors and also as refreshers at later points in the year. It has direct instructions, which is appropriate for new middle school tutors. For example, making sure tutors greet the students and introduce themselves may seem self-evident to older students, but being “in charge” of an academic activity with a peer is a new experience for most middle schoolers. The document provides clear and comprehensive instructions for how to conduct a writing center session by breaking the session into three main parts. Included in the description are activities and examples that provide additional guidance for the tutors. The writing samples that follow are grade-level appropriate for middle school. Many of these practices are standard within the writing center community and have been adapted from Richard Kent’s A Guide to Creating Student-Staffed Writing Centers, Grades 6-12 (2006) and The Bedford Guide for Writing Tutors, by Leigh Ryan and Lisa Zimmerelli (2016).
The resource here includes a series of scenarios that can be used to role play how tutors can effectively approach various writing center situations. Many of these were inspired by TheBedford Guide for Writing Tutors (2016)but were adapted to be more accessible and relatable to middle school students. There are two sets of role play scenarios in this document.
Student word-of-mouth is key but so is staff understanding. Even if you are lucky enough to be able to present to your entire staff, staff outreach guides are perfect for succinctly communicating what the writing center is, how it can help them and their students, how they can use it, hours of operation, and contact information for the director(s). To maximize teacher usage, email as well as print these on non-white paper, and you’ll often see them in classrooms throughout the school. This guide can also be shared with parents at a back-to-school night. Consider personally delivering copies of your staff outreach guides. These deliveries are yet another opportunity to gather information about upcoming assignments for which the writing center can provide aid, as well as getting a preview of the issues that teachers are seeing in their students’ writing. If you are starting a center at a school, educating your colleagues about the value and purpose of your writing center will be essential, especially in regions where writing centers are uncommon. Few people have any concept about what a writing center can be, and their experience is mostly limited to writing centers at their universities and colleges. This document has two examples.
Classroom presentations give students the opportunity to learn about the center as well as to put a face to the tutors. They can be a quick run-down of the center or a longer demonstration of what sessions look like, using a fish-bowl structure. Depending on your space, an alternative to classroom presentations is having a class gather in the writing center for an orientation. The best time for a classroom presentation is not long after students have been given a major writing assignment. You want to hit the sweet spot where students have started writing but still have time for a session before their due date. With good timing, the classroom presentation gives potential tutees an authentic reason to schedule a session. Here is an outline for how presentations would actually proceed. Use a variety of tutors, if possible, to showcase your staff.
Chapter 12 – Gathering Evidence and Reporting Data
After tutors have completed a tutoring session, clients, other tutors, and directors can provide constructive criticism for the tutors’ performance. Directors may use these forms to track a tutor’s performance in the center or save these forms for tutors to complete larger-scale reflections of their work over time. This data can also be tallied to look at the overall strengths and areas of improvement for the center. Gathering client feedback is part of measuring the success of your center and is useful in adapting your training process to better meet the needs of your clients. Client feedback can be collected through a paper form at the end of a session, or clients could be asked to complete an online survey that they access immediately or through email after the session. Feedback from a director or a peer is as useful as client feedback because the observer can address issues with the session and have a deeper conversation about successes or improvements. This sample is more extensive in terms of questions and the use of a likert scale, which gives more specific data and can be more useful to the tutor. Once a month, or at some regular intervals, tutors should gather the feedback on their particular session and reflect on what their clients had to say, perhaps using a form similar to the “Tally, Compile, and Reflect” document that follows these samples.
One way to expand the services of the writing center outside the English department is to help tutors develop workshops assisting students from other disciplines to improve their writing process and product. Workshops can support the mission of the school and the center by appealing to different grade levels and content areas. They can either happen in the writing center or in a teacher’s classroom. When creating a new workshop, a well-designed plan is essential to success. This is a template that helps students develop a detailed plan as it guides them in thinking about its design and ensures that the tutors have followed a workshop model. Writing center faculty provide additional support by reviewing the template well in advance of the workshop and offering advice as needed. Sample topics include lab report missteps, MLA or APA style, paraphrasing and in-text citations, improving style, finding digital sources for research, etc.
Once you’ve planned the workshop, it’s time to deliver it! While not required, this does help tutors remember all the steps and information, provides attendees visual samples, and can be shared with teachers afterwards or posted to the writing center website. Live links are extremely helpful to supplement samples and to provide additional practice. If you are designing a workshop to be completed asynchronously, make sure the slides stand on their own. Each year, a significant percentage of seniors participate in the annual process of writing a college application essay. Often, juniors and even seniors struggle with the process until the English department intervenes and provides assistance with the essay. To supplement the English department or to offer a standalone, consider offering a college application workshop. The college workshop slideshow below outlines the process, offers tips on content, and provides advice on the structure, diction, and syntax required to separate your students’ applications from the thousands many admission offices receive each year. (Note: This is a tutor-created slideshow workshop written in 2021; double check for updated requirements when presenting a workshop of your own.)
This email template is an example of how a secondary director may “cold-call” directors at the collegiate level or another potential partner such as a community organization or city council member to open lines of communication. This sample includes a bit about the center’s history and the number of tutors; that information may or may not be important to include depending on the type of collaboration you have in mind. It might be best to send this communication from a professional or school email account.
Outreach can happen between other schools within your district. More than just promotion, writing center tutors can go into the community to help improve writing skills, all the while spreading the word about what writing centers are and do. While your tutors can design and deliver writing lessons for elementary schoolers and community members, this is particularly helpful for introducing middle school students to the writing center, helping to bridge the gap between middle and high school writing, and opening up the conversation for writing centers in your district’s middle schools! This resource provides an overview of such a project, some mini-lessons as tutors develop their lessons, and two ways to promote student attendance.
If you are accepted to present at a conference, or if you simply want to attend, many districts have a great deal of red tape to acquire funding and time away from the classroom. Below is a sample letter to administration explaining what the SSWCA conference is, the benefits to the director, and the funds needed.
