Utilizing Program Tutors
Thank you for integrating the Writing Center into your program curriculum. We are staffed by current Evergreen students, all of whom are interested in and enthusiastic about helping their peers develop better writing practices. We look forward to working with you.
What We Do
The main goal of our tutors is to assist writers in becoming more confident and proficient. Tutors do this by focusing upon each individual work as an independent step in the overall development of a writer's process. While we do not line-edit or proofread, we do teach writers effective self-editing. Tutors give feedback, offer suggestions, discuss writing strategies, and emphasize the importance of a solid writing process. Tutors are not teachers or evaluators; a tutor is a peer who assists writers as they grapple with the act and art of writing.
While writers may be working on a specific assignment within a session, the outcome of the session may not immediately demonstrate improvements in that student’s writing. Because we value writing as a process, our primary concern is encouraging better engagement in the act of writing rather than trying to improve a single piece of work.
Individual Tutoring
The Writing Center's predominant role in your program is to offer one-on-one tutoring with your students. We will require that each student attend one appointment in order to see what the Center is like and to introduce them to our tutoring methods.
We encourage and welcome faculty members wishing to experience or observe tutoring sessions. Familiarizing yourself with our work will allow you to better understand our tutoring process. Please contact the Center’s director to schedule your session.
If, as a faculty team, you require weekly tutoring appointments, it is not the responsibility of the Center to report student attendance. Writing Center tutors have been explicitly instructed not to sign any papers or to track attendance. Instead, we suggest asking students to write and turn in a weekly reflection to faculty about their tutoring session.
If a student signs up for a weekly appointment time and that student fails to attend his/her appointment without prior cancellation on two occasions, s/he will be dropped from his/her weekly time slot and will be responsible for rescheduling. With few exceptions, students are only allowed two visits per week to the Writing Center. We believe that writers need time to process their visits with us and that writers are less likely to become dependent on us for assistance because of this policy.
Peer Review Facilitation
Tutors are available to facilitate peer review workshops either in your program or in the Writing Center. Flexibility in scheduling these facilitations and a meeting with the Center's director are required.
To properly schedule peer review facilitation, we require notification before the beginning of the quarter. We will not schedule peer review facilitations past the start of the quarter. Understand that our ability to facilitate peer reviews in your program is dependent upon scheduling and that requesting peer review facilitation does not automatically assure that your request can be honored.
Students also may attend our peer review workshops if they desire practice with peer review. Please consult our workshop schedules for more information.
Workshops
Faculty may schedule workshops available from our Workshop Series as part of a program. A terrific follow-up to any one of our workshops is an individual session with a tutor.
We expect that faculty will attend in-program workshops to answer questions about assignments and program logistics.
Writing Center policy dictates that faculty and staff requesting workshops must pay for any required handouts out of their program budget and bring the handouts to class on the day of the workshop. Handouts can be downloaded from the Workshop Descriptions pages of our web site.
Presenting the Writing Center in Your Program
Your program tutors, once assigned, will schedule an in-program visit to gather sign-ups for your students' initial tutoring sessions. While our program tutors are trained to give some background about the Writing Center, please keep in mind that the message that the faculty sends is equally, if not more, important.
We suggest that visits to or work with the Writing Center be completely integrated with your program. The attitude and wording used to announce the Writing Center's participation within your program can make or break an entire quarter's worth of visits. Please consider carefully how you announce our involvement.
Student Privacy
Any information that students provide to the Writing Center for our use is considered confidential and used only to schedule and track appointments. We do not disclose records of appointments to faculty because it undermines the Center/writer relationship.