Building an online writing center: student tutors look to the past to construct a future.

In the spring semester of 2007 at Rutgers University, eight undergraduate student tutors and the Coordinator of one of Rutgers's three Writing Centers met every two weeks to participate in the Writing Center Internship course. The mission of that internship was to consider the following question: "What does the future hold for tutoring?" The future, for us, concerned online tutoring. We decided to try to understand how an online writing center resource could work at our school; the interns' task was to read and respond to texts that considered the philosophy of writing centers, for both face-to-face and online tutoring, and to survey the different kinds of online writing centers that already existed. They then tested their preferred versions of online tutoring with students while reflecting on the experience in the context of the literature that we read in the course. At the end of the semester, each intern wrote a 10-page paper, offering answers to the question that formed the foundation for the course. Collectively, their main conclusion was an obvious but important one: any form of online tutoring which does not foster the same kind of metacognition that is often brought about in face-to-face tutoring does a disservice to the student and to the tutor.

The semester after that internship, the Coordinator of another of the Rutgers Writing Centers launched four pilots in online tutoring to further explore the ideas the interns had posited. Four tutors took part in these pilots: two of them had been interns in Spring 2007, and their work in the pilot extended their internship projects; two started working on the project in Fall 2007, developing their own original approaches to online tutoring. In this article, we discuss the concepts developed by the interns and the pilot tutors as they tested various kinds of online tutoring. During both the internship and the pilot stage, our tutors were working within the structure of face-to-face tutoring at Rutgers. When students sign up for tutoring, they commit to five one-and-a-half hour tutoring sessions over the course of five consecutive weeks. Students get course credit for attending tutoring; attendance is compulsory; and missing more than one out of the five sessions results in the student being dropped from tutoring and receiving an F for the course. (2) This structure is a restrictive one when compared to those employed at many other writing centers, and so it had a significant impact on some of the decisions that the tutors made.

During both phases of the online tutoring research project, the interns and pilot tutors started with minimalist tutoring as their basic pedagogical philosophy, an approach described by Brooks in which tutors cede most of the instructional authority in the tutoring session to their students and help the students to make their own decisions about invention, organization, and revision in their writing. The goal of minimalist tutoring is to help students develop strong writing practices rather than to fix individual pieces of writing. Minimalist tutoring is the official tutoring style of the Rutgers Writing Centers, having been mandated by the directors of the Writing Program there (see Lioi's "Small Victories" for more discussion of the philosophy and practice of minimalist tutoring at Rutgers). During our discussions in the internship and during staff development workshops over the course of 2007, we considered the merits and limitations of minimalist tutoring; in the end, the tutors decided that what they do is something they called "active minimalist tutoring," whereby the tutor takes on more authority than in traditional minimalist tutoring, as the situation requires. We recognize, however, that this foundation of minimalist tutoring limited what the interns and the tutors involved in the pilot identified as a successful online tutoring interaction,. That is, even if the session was successful in developing a student's understanding of what made a piece of writing more effective, the session was judged to have been a successful one only if the tutor managed to be as non-directive as is possible in a face-to-face session. The interns in particular identified the online environment as one where it was easy to become directive and to fill in silence with chatter, and so they were skeptical of any session where they ended up giving directive responses, even though other studies of online tutoring considered such sessions to be successful (e.g. Jones et al.'s "Interactional Dynamics").

CONCLUSIONS FROM THE INTERNSHIP

The eight interns went into the internship skeptical of online tutoring in terms of what it offered both the student and the tutor, inculcated as they were with the principles of minimalist tutoring and the value of an ongoing face-to-face relationship with their students. (3) The interns felt strongly that without an ongoing tutor-student relationship there is less incentive on the part of the tutor to lead the student towards independence, and so a "maximalist" (4) style of tutoring is much easier to adopt.

The interns considered models of online tutoring that would allow students to work more independently, but they were not impressed by the usefulness of many existing online resources for helping students achieve this independence. The interns agreed that the "storehouse" model (see Lunsford) of an online writing center was best suited for use as a supplement to a face-to-face tutoring session; so, interns and pilot tutors instead focused on an interactive online writing center model, one where the students' voices were as important as those of tutors and instructors. Only with this balance, they argued, would the tutoring experience online be different from a face-to-face classroom setting, where the teacher is the primary focus of all learning, and the student who does best is the student who can internalize the lessons according to the rules set by the teacher. An interactive online space places the students in a position of power, where they can control the tutoring sessions and thereby learn how to work independently in different kinds of personae from the ones they assume in the classroom. Students' familiarity with electronic media, too, would reinforce this relatively authoritative student position.

The model of tutoring adopted by the interns and the pilot tutors predominantly became a hybrid model, combining online and face-to-face tutoring. Linking up online and face-to-face tutoring meant that the tutors set up an expectation that the students would have to participate actively in the online tutoring process in order to make the most of their face-to-face sessions. Crucially, the interns were mostly seeking a way to supplement their face-to-face tutoring sessions with online resources rather than providing a self-contained tutoring experience, either online or face-to- face. In the following sections we will see the models of tutoring that the tutors tested out in the internship and pilots, along with the reasoning behind the various decisions that the tutors made.

FROM INTERNSHIP TO PILOT

Chat tutoring

Throughout the internship, the interns thought that a chat-room mode of online tutoring could provide the closest approximation of face-to-face tutoring possible and so should be considered and tested seriously. (5) Justin and Victoria tested this method during both the internship and the pilot, while several other interns discussed the possibilities in their internship essays. But the eventual conclusion was discouraging, especially given our initial optimism: chat tutoring, via an instant-messaging service, was not productive, for the reasons predicted by another intern, Nanci. She wrote:

I can conceive of a chat-room being detrimental to a student ... if face-to-face tutoring were eliminated altogether, or if a tutor were to become maximalist in this particular realm and a student were to become too reliant on chat at a set time that would serve as a last-minute "fix-it-shop" session before a paper is due. (Aydelotte 5)

Victoria experienced exactly this problem in her sessions during the internship and the pilot: she found that her persona in the chat room departed from that of the minimalist tutor. She struggled to keep on track throughout the internship and the pilot, finding herself becoming directive in her tutoring sessions and being tempted to actively edit her students' writing. From the Coordinator's point of view, however, Victoria's experience underscored another advantage of online tutoring practice: it made an already strong tutor acutely aware of the temptation to take charge and forced her to rethink how to create a student-driven, minimalist tutoring session.

Email tutoring

Many of the interns saw email tutoring as a good supplement to face-to-face tutoring, especially because the once-a- week format of tutoring at our institution meant that our students' tutoring session often did not coincide with the due dates for their papers. Justin, an intern who went on to participate in the pilot, therefore set up his online tutoring sessions with his students so that they would email him with specific questions about a paper draft a couple of days before the draft was due. The student would then have enough time to implement the suggestions from the exchange in her paper. Patrick also used the email model in the pilot; he had his students email him two days before their face-to-face sessions with a progress report on their papers. Both tutors found that this structure opened up the space for them to prepare their students for their face-to-face sessions. Furthermore, once coached, the students were generally more reflective about their own writing, as well as about the specific papers they were working on.

Justin and his students found the email exchanges to be productive for two main reasons. First, Justin coached his students to provide concrete questions and concerns in the email that accompanied the paper drafts that they were sending. Getting them to do this required some coaching, which Justin did in the face-to-face prelude to the online tutoring sessions. Justin posed several questions to students submitting a final draft by email, primarily questions about the strengths and difficulties the students perceived in their own writing and the areas in which they were seeking help. This structured set-up elicited good responses from his students. In his final essay for the internship, Justin provides one example of a student's response, which he received via email the day after his regular face-to-face session with this student:

   If you get a chance I would really appreciate if you can look over
   my essay. It is due this Thursday. I think the strengths so far are
   that I stay on topic and my thesis is clear. The biggest weakness
   might be that my supporting paragraphs don't support my thesis
   enough. I would like you to look at the flow/organization, the
   development of ideas, as well as surface level concerns. (Brown 5)

As we see in this response, this student has clearly made decisions about what he wants from the tutoring session. Several of the interns noted similar experiences: an asynchronous online tutoring experience could be more student-driven than even the face-to-face sessions that these emails were supplementing; furthermore, the email sessions gave the students practice with a vocabulary which they could bring to their face-to-face sessions. The second main finding was that, contrary to initial concerns, the email approach allowed and, indeed, forced a tutor to be more minimalist in his approach to tutoring than he was even in face-to-face sessions. Justin and several of the other interns noted that this format eliminated the uncomfortable silences and the tutor's perceived need to fill in those silences. A student's responses to any tutoring appeared in the draft. This was a crucial point that several interns noticed: rather than the student expressing brilliant ideas orally and then asking the tutor what she had just said, all breakthroughs happened in writing. Justin's exchanges with his students show the potential that asynchronous systems hold to enhance and supplement face-to-face tutoring. They also suggest a way that email exchanges outside of regular face-to-face tutoring might be used advantageously, provided that the set-up is strong enough. Furthermore, because tutors were responding to students' paper outside of the texts rather than using editing tools such as Track Changes, they avoided falling into the fix-it shop model that is so readily available in an online environment.

MORE EXPERIMENTS IN ONLINE TUTORING: THE PILOT

Online Tutoring and Grammar

During the pilot, Patrick sought to use online tutoring to encourage students to think about their papers before their actual tutoring sessions. He also focused on using online tutoring sessions to help students recognize patterns of error and attempt to make their own corrections before the face-to-face meeting. Most of his students were, not surprisingly, reluctant to make use of this service: their response was something like, "If I knew what was wrong, I would fix it!" But those who did use this service surprised themselves and their teachers with the progress they made. Patrick would ask for a paragraph or two from the student, paragraphs that the student believed contained sentence-level problems. He highlighted one kind of problem only (such as pronoun reference), offered his own explanation of the cause and fix, and modeled one or two corrections. Additionally, he linked the errors to fuller online explanations and models, thereby using the storehouse model of the online Writing Center in a way similar to that which the interns considered to be the most effective.

Online Tutoring for Non-traditional Students

Our most marked success in our online pilots came from the work of Peter, a graduate TA who teaches not only Expository Writing but also "bizntech," i.e., Writing for Business and the Professions, and Scientific and Technical Writing. Many students in those classes are non-traditional students, often paying their own way through college and usually accustomed to working independently despite schedules involving full-time jobs and children. Traditionally, very few of these students come for face-to-face tutoring at the three Rutgers writing centers, yet we often hear from their teachers that they need help both in basic writing and literacy skills as well as the more specialized research and analytical writing their long proposal projects require. Originally, Peter worked with only two sections of these classes, both synchronously and asynchronously. The semester following the pilot (Spring 2008), demand for this service became so great that we added three additional tutors to the program, eliminated the synchronous aspect, and created a program as close to an online version of our face-to-face program as possible. This system departed somewhat from the ideals set forth by the interns but did fulfill the metacognitive goals that the interns identified as being most important in any tutoring interaction.

The success of the bizntech tutoring program has taught us a lot about how to proceed with other online tutoring. We had suspected that student reluctance to come to face-to-face tutoring, one of the problems we set out to address, might spring from Rutgers's stringent policy of requiring a five-week commitment with only one absence allowed before failing tutoring. However, Peter instituted a similar system for his online students. They register for tutoring just like any other student and are obliged each week to submit by email their current writing project and a metacognitive reflection for a response. Attendance is recorded, and, just as in face-to-face tutoring, students have the option of continuing or terminating the tutoring relationship after five weeks. Instead of discouraging student participation, this system has done nothing to slow down the demand for this service and in fact may have encouraged more word-of-mouth advertising among students.

CONCLUSION

The potential for increased distance between tutor and student in online tutoring that David Carlson and Eileen Apperson-Williams identify is a real danger, one that our interns and pilot tutors found to be best alleviated by a hybrid format. The conservatism of the interns in their views of online tutoring--seeing it only really working as a supplement to face-to-face tutoring--turned out to produce the most effective model of online tutoring for most of the students at Rutgers, according to the standards of success that the interns had set for themselves. The interns all suggested that the greatest potential for online tutoring lay in its self-help possibilities and the models and incentives it offered for metacognitive reflection. At the same time, the hybrid model that the interns favored is only possible for those students who have free time to spend on campus, whereas the students who stand to benefit most from online tutoring are those students whose on-campus presence is restricted by their work and family schedules.

Our greatest success story, at least by the numbers, was in providing tutoring resources to those students who do not usually sign-up for face-to-face sessions, and those sessions worked best when the tutor, Peter, put in place the same structures that govern the regular Writing Center sessions. We found that building an explicit link between online tutoring and some kind of face-to-face interaction--either in a tutoring session or by visiting the class--helped students take advantage of the online services offered, and teaching students to set up their tutoring sessions made both online and face-to-face tutoring more effective.

Works Cited

Aydelotte, Nancianne. "Tutoring at the Plangere Writing Center: Enabling Greater Success by Exploring the Range of Online Tutoring Options." Unpublished term paper, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, 2007.

Brooks, Jeff. "Minimalist Tutoring: Making the Student Do All the Work." Writing Lab Newsletter 15.6 (1991):1-4.

Brown, Justin. "Writing Center Internship Proposal." Unpublished term paper. Rutgers University, New Brunswick, 2007.

Carlson, David, and Eileen Apperson-Williams. "The Anxieties of Distance: Online Tutors Reflect." Taking Flight with Owls: Examining Electronic Writing Center Work. Ed. James A. Inman and Donna Sewell. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2000. 129-40.

Jones, Rodney H., Angel Garralda, David C.S. Li, and Graham Lock. "Interactional Dynamics in On-line and Face-to-face Peer-tutoring Sessions for Second Language Writers." Journal of Second Language Writing 15 (2006): 1-23.

Lioi, Anthony. "Small Victories: The Practice and Process of Tutoring." Instructor's Resource Manual, The New Humanities Reader. Ed. Kurt Spellmeyer and Richard Miller. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003. 69-74.

Lunsford, Andrea. "Collaboration, Control, and the Idea of a Writing Center." The St. Martin's Sourcebook for Writing Tutors. Ed. Christina Murphy and Steve Sherwood. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995. 36-42.

Thonus, Terese. "Tutor and Student Assessment of Academic Writing Tutorials: What is 'Success'?" Assessing Writing 8 (2002): 110-134.

Karen Kalteissen, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ

Heather Robinson, York College/CUNY, Jamaica, NY

Endnotes

(1) We could not have written this article without the dedication and insight of the interns from the Spring 2007 Writing Center Internship, and of the four "pilot" tutors in Fall 2007, and all the students who submitted so graciously to our experiments. The authors' humblest thanks go to Nanci Aydelotte, Justin Brown, Judy Cheng, David Johnston, Caroline Mannaerts, Israel Rubinstein, Victoria Whitfield and Michelle Zjawin (Spring 2007), and Patrick Hosfield, Peter Sorrell, and Justin and Victoria again in Fall 2007. Thanks also must go to Michelle Brazier and Tracy Budd for their editorial help on late drafts, and to an anonymous reviewer for valuable revision suggestions.

(2) Students enrolled in the tutoring course at Rutgers do not receive credit towards graduation, but those credits do contribute to a student's full time status, and it appears on a student's transcript with a grade of "Pass" or "Fail."

(3) See Thonus (125) for evidence that an ongoing student-tutor relationship has no impact on the success of a tutoring session in terms of effectiveness. Our experience, however, is that it makes tutors and students happier and more invested.

(4) Several of the interns independently coined this term in response to our discussions of Brooks's article. They used the term to refer to modes of tutoring that are directive and/or tutor-centered.

(5) An anonymous reviewer points out that replicating face-to-face tutoring practice is not necessarily the best route to success for an online writing center. The authors of this paper agree, and feel that the success of the pilot online tutoring program for non-traditional students demonstrates the merits of taking a different approach to tutoring. The interns, on the other hand, were best pleased when their online interactions did resemble their face-to-face interactions, believing that the students got the most out of such sessions.