Reflection on Tutoring Internship

Yiwen Ou

Penn State University

December 10th, 2018

 As an experienced English learner and a novice English teacher/tutor, the one-

semester tutoring experience to me is about both practice and learning. Before the

tutoring began, I was excited about the opportunities to help three tutees with my own

knowledge and experience as a learner of Academic writing. At the same time I felt

worried about the coming challenges, because I almost had no idea about the

difficulties that my tutees would encounter during their learning. What I used to

comfort myself was that at least I was a peer reader for them, and I could give them

some suggestions on the perspective as an audience.

As a result, I basically viewed myself as a peer reader in the first few tutoring

sessions with my tutees, which caused my struggling with my authority. I felt hard to

be firm to my tutees when they were not on the right track, and I also felt uneasy to

disagree with their opinions because it may influence our friendships. And I also

experienced moments that I did not know how to answer the questions of tutees.

These struggles made me doubt that if I could be an adequate tutor and be helpful for

them in writing. However with my own reflections and help from Dr. Verity, I

gradually developed better approaches to help my tutees and I could see them get

improved with the help of the instructor and me. And during the process, my tutees

and I grew to be more experienced and built valuable friendships.

This whole experience is like me as a chef to work with three intern chefs in a

kitchen of a restaurant. The style of the restaurant was like our writing genre of

academic writing, and my job was to guide them to cook their dishes. They were my

apprentices and they needed to learn to cook eligible dishes with their own practice.
They would have recipes for each dish, and they needed to collect required

ingredients. Then they ought to pick up useful parts from the ingredients and slice or

cut them up for cooking. With careful practice, they would be more and more skilled

in these steps. In the process of food ordering, the customers were likely to have

different preferences about sides and dressings for salad. So it was important for them

to listen carefully to their audience.

The first intern chef that I got to know was Alice. She was an ambitious and

passionate novice chef who aimed to cook the most delicious food in the world. Her

positive attitude and enthusiasm motivated her to spend much effort on the practice,

however sometimes she neglected the requirements of the recipes and customers. The

biggest problem with Alice’s writing was that she sometimes ignored her original plan

of organization and wrote a long part that she liked. This was just like a dish in which

she added a lot of mushrooms which she considered to be delicious, but I needed to

help her to understand such dish might not be an eligible one to the customer. And if

there was no mushroom in the recipe of that particular dish, it was not appropriate to

add it. During our first several sessions, I constantly asked her to check the

assignment sheets on Canvas for the requirements. And I always asked her to guide

me through her drafts, if she could not explain the function of a part, she gradually

knew she need to revise it. Around the middle of the semester, she was able to make

and stick to a plan based on the requirements of assignment sheet and the needs of

audience before writing.

Alice is a very outgoing girl and we seemed to become friends after our first
meeting, so I quiet enjoyed the meetings with her. However a challenge came with

this lovely friendship, it was really difficult for me to be firm and authoritative in

front of her. In our second meeting, she had a paragraph which was not related to her

topic. And she wrote it just because she like it. And I felt so uneasy to ask her to

delete it. Finally I spent much time to suggest her to delete that in a very periphrastic

way. In my sixth meeting with her, Alice said that she did not think about the next

assignment yet because she thought it was easy to think of a topic and there was still

plenty of time (session 6). And I tried to suggest her to work earlier in a very gentle

way. However in the seventh session, I found out that she did not change her attitude

about it, and this time I told her seriously that if she did not pay enough attention and

time on it, she may face with many problems in future assignments. Then she changed

her attitude, but at that time she needed much time to make up for her lack of effort of

the early preparations for the assignments. I really hoped that I had made her realize

this problem earlier.

There was another intern chef called Irena in our kitchen. Her passion and

motivation towards cooking resembled Alice. She was such an organized chef that

everything concerned with cooking such as the recipe, the notes of the requirements

of the customers and the collected ingredients are classified and settled in great order.

Whenever I gave her any suggestion on cooking, she would take notes on a notebook.

Irena was not confident and worried about her assignments in our first several

sessions, but I found out she was a diligent and intelligent girl. So I gave her much

encouragement and help her to have confidence. She had a great habit to keep a
notebook about what we discussed in each session, so I could frequently noticed that

she applied my suggestions into practice, which is really encouraging for me. In the

first session I guided her to do a reflection for her first draft of extended definition

essay, and in the second meeting she came to the meeting with several questions to

ask me, I was surprised to find out that she noticed some problems of her draft by

herself. And she told me that “it was because she reflected on her writing process as

what I guided her to do in our first meeting” (Session 4). And she maintained this

good habit throughout this semester. As for her positive attitude, I mostly act like a

peer reader for her.

Alice and Irena both came to the kitchen with passion about cooking, and they

were motivated to make continuous effort to improve their skills. However, the third

intern chef named Gina in the kitchen was not really interested in cooking itself. Her

goal in this kitchen was to satisfy the needs of the customer with the help of the recipe

and me. And unlike Alice and Irena who treated me like a friend or even an elderly

sister, Gina treated me like an instructor who was less authoritative than her course

instructor. As a result, my relationship with her and the focus of our meetings were

quite different from the former two.

In our first two meetings, I noticed that she did not have a positive attitude

toward her development of writing. When I asked her about some reflection of her

first essay, she replied like this “Then she told me she thought it was easy and she

thought she did it perfectly, because the instructor gave her a full score.” (Session 1).

And when I wanted to review the comments from her instructor to her first essay,
“She replied that the ED essay had been submitted, so we could not change the score

by looking at that essay now.” (Session 2). At that time, “I think that she still believes

the best way of doing assignment is getting great scores with least energy.” (Session

2). So my focus with Gina was different from Alice and Irena. For the other two, I

mostly helped them with their development of writing skills and to think like a writer.

But with Gina, I hoped she could realize that the purpose of the assignments of

ESL015 courses was to develop her skills of academic writing which was important

for her university study. And my job as a tutor was to “help her to improve academic

writing skills instead of helping her to get higher scores on assignments.” (Session 2)

For our meetings in the first half of the semester, she did not change her mind, and I

guided her patiently. I also tried to make her understand that I really want to help her

and be friend with her. But her attitude towards the course and our different cultural

background increased the difficulty of accomplishing my goals.

Although she did not change her mind quickly, but I could feel that our

relationship got better and closer after we worked out some problems of her writing

together. In our 3rd session, I noticed that she had big problems with citations, and she

did not seem to care about that much. The thing is like, if there is a beverage on the

menu called home-made milk tea, the chef is not supposed to serve a bottle of

beverage which she or he buy from a supermarket. In my 8th session with Gina, she

came to the meeting with several questions instead of asking me about what to do, and

I was so surprised to find out that she had a rather clear plan of writing this essay. And

for all the meetings after that, she prepared questions to improve her essay.
 Reflecting on the whole semester’s tutoring practice, I could notice my

identities as a tutor changed. In the beginning, as a novice tutor whose age was similar

to my tutees. I considered myself to be a peer reader to them, which helped us to build

a comparatively close relationships. However, it was hard for me to be authoritative. I

felt uneasy to be firm and they did not treat the suggestions from me as serious as

those from an instructor. Then I noticed this issue and I thought I needed to be more

like an instructor.

Consequently, I began to give them more guidance and help them in a more

directive way, during which time I influenced them more than what a tutor should. I

once reject a topic of Alice in my third session because of my own understanding of

the essay, and Dr. Verity gave me very useful suggestions “please be careful about

telling a tutee to reject a topic; this is the job of the classroom instructor, not the tutor:

as a tutor you are encouraged to QUESTION and PROBE a tutee's choice, and push

them to think more deeply. Also, you can model other ideas, but your questions

should bring the tutee to the realization that a topic is too weak, or too broad, etc.”

(Comments of session 3) Suddenly I realized that I should not position myself as the

role of an instructor, and I did not really help them to write their essays if I gave them

too much advice based my own thoughts. It’s like when I worked with my intern

chefs in the kitchen, what I should do is to guide them to cook their dishes instead of

teaching them how I cook.

After that time, I began to ask more questions about their thoughts and

reflections on her writing process and encouraged them to speak more in our tutoring
meetings. In this way I could know their expectations of their dishes and how I

could help them to achieve their goals. During this process I also gained more

confidence, because I realized I did not need to give them the “right” answers towards

every question. If they are working on a particular draft of essay and asking me

questions about what to write for the next paragraph or how to get full scores. I would

feel anxious in my first several sessions with them because I was not sure about the

“right” answers. But later I realized that it was not appropriate for me to give answers.

What I should do was to use guidance to push them to think, and this task was not that

hard for me.

To conclude, the time spent with the three intern chefs has been a valuable and

happy experience for me. When I listened to them to talk about their organized drafts

of problem and solution essay, I thought of our first sessions in which they were all so

confused about the organization of the extended definition essay. I was surprised and

impressive to see how much they have improved during this semester, and I really

appreciated the opportunities to become their tutor and friend.