Writing Center Tutor/Consultant Workshop:

10-Minute Takeaways

Location: JSSB 203 (map)

 

Writing Centers vary in their day-to-day practices. Some centers have 50-minute sessions, while others have 30 min or even 15 min sessions. Some centers have synchronous online appointments, some offer editing services for graduates or faculty, some offer appointments while others operate on a drop-in-only basis. But most writing centers do share a pragmatic view about teaching, about improving the writer. To that end, most sessions contain at least one moment of instruction, of teaching the student a concept or skill that can be applied in their own writing and perhaps in future work. Sometimes the teaching is at the sentence level, and students learn what a comma splice is and how to fix it. At other times, the teaching is at a conceptual level, and students learn how to tailor a thesis to a specific audience. And at other times still the teaching is metacognitive, helping students to think critically about the thinking and learning that they are doing in the moment of the session.

 

Tutors will have a chance to learn a range of 10-Minute Takeaways—what you can teach a student in 10 minutes that they can take away and use in their own writing. Tutors will also have a chance to map out some of their own teaching practices and share some of their own 10-Minute Takeaways with other attendees. Tutors will leave this workshop with a wide range of new and applicable teaching strategies that they can apply to their own practice in their home centers. 

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Writing Center Administrators Workshop:

Training Tutors in Best Practices

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Location: JSSB 204 (map)

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Most writing centers have some sort of training and professional development program in place. At some centers, that program is robust and includes online readings or courses, face-to-face staff professional development, pre-semester orientation, observations and coaching sessions, and so on. At other centers, pragmatic considerations mean that there might only be one staff meeting all semester. Whatever pragmatics may exist, the majority of writing center practitioners acknowledge that better training results in both better consulting and more invested consultants.

 

Attendees will have a chance to reflect on the training and professional development needs of their individual centers, learn from live demonstrations of training and development activities, and share and revise some of their own activities. Attendees will leave with multiple specific activities/strategies for professionally developing the staff at their home centers. 

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Send questions to Justin Bain, Conference Chair, at Justin.Bain@ucdenver.edu 

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