First Session

During my first observation I observed an older tutor, who was helping a student he already had met last semester and so he was familiar with her background. He began the session by asking her how she did since the last time they sat down together and so on. After those questions, he asked her what they would be working on today and the piece that the student needed help with was not an actual paper, but an assignment to observe a child for her psychology class and describe in detail how the child behaves. The tutor went step by step through the assignments instructions with the student, and then began to look over what she had come up with so far. He focused on two major things, her grammar and use of tense, and the amount of detail she was providing. Throughout her entire assignment, the tutor helped the student adjust all that she had written into only one tense, past tense, instead of the various she had down. What he primarily focused and ecouraged with many questions was the details of what she had observed. For example, she had written "the child sits at the table and does homework". The tutor encouraged her to describe what kind of homework, "Was she coloring? Reading? What was she reading? Did she write anything? What did she write with?" and so on. Looking back onto today and previous class discussions, I realized the tutor was using a lot of what he have discussed, collaborative learning, talk and write, and so on. His use of questions helped improve her assignment and by the end of it she left very satisfied and said she felt ready to type out her assignment with the changes made and felt more confident in receiving a good grade on it.