Great Class!

Today, in Teaching Writing, a question was raised even before class started--about a student in a public high school whose family was told she must have tutoring but who was accused of plagiarizing when she turned in a paper written under the tutor's guidance. The student who raised the question was incensed, but she brought the question into class for discussion, and it sparked a truly passionate discussion that served to bring together a number of important issues we've been talking about all along.

The circumstances: An administration required the family to provide tutoring for the student. No list of tutors was provided to the family. The family selected a friend, not trained in writing instruction or tutoring but characterized in our class discussion as "very smart." The student who was being tutored was said to have "good ideas" but needed help with essay structure and editing. According to the student who reported the situation to us, there was some feeling that the tutor began taking over the paper, so that the final product was, perhaps more representative of the tutor's thinking than of the student's. After the student turned in the paper, the teacher, without any consultation with the student but in full awareness that she was being tutored, reported the student for plagiarism.

Who's at fault here? What could/should have been done differently?

First of all, it seems to me that if the administration requires tutoring, they have some obligation to set guidelines for families obtaining tutoring, perhaps developing a list of qualified tutors. Who is a qualified tutor? Someone with some training in writing instruction, in the ethics of tutoring, or in both. Second, it seems to me that if the teacher has been informed that the student is being required to work with a tutor (as this teacher was), she has some obligation to communicate with the student, ideally with the tutor as well, about how the tutoring is being conducted. In a school with a writing center, regular communication among all of the stakeholders is a key ingredient for successful tutorial work--work that helps the student grow as a writer and that is informed by familiarity with teacher expectations and standards. This is not to say that a writing tutor should contact a teacher to say, "I'm working with so-and-so. What can you tell me about her needs?" But tutoring that is going on outside of the system may well go astray--as apparently happened here--and if the system is mandating the tutoring, it is up to those who do the mandating to facilitate the communication process.

Our discussion proceeded like this. Some of our class members are tutors in our Writing Center, under my direction. I asked them what might be a problem with employing a tutor who had no background in tutoring writing, and they responded based on their knowledge of how we work with writers without taking over their papers. We talked about ownership of a paper, and we situated teaching relative to tutoring and editing--noting that editing is not teaching or tutoring, and that a student whose papers are simply edited by someone else is not learning more about writing. This brought us back to considerations of writing process--of why an understanding of process is important, so that we can prioritize our responses to learners' texts, moving from global, or whole-text, considerations to local, or sentence-level and word-level, considerations. We revisited a topic that had come up earlier in the week: what if you don't know what to do with a text, even if you know it's below-average, and we saw how these process-embedded priorities could help teachers work with students and help us look more carefully at our own papers.

What if you have good ideas but can't get them onto paper? was another question. We talked about ways to work with individual students, taking dictation, for instance, and getting those ideas onto paper where we can, then, work with them. Of course, no one can take a tutor along to a standardized test session, so it is useful to give students a quick test-prep mini-course in the couple of weeks leading up to a standardized test, when a pretty standard approach to essay writing will work quite well.

Talking about standardized tests and test scores, and the pressure to prepare students to perform well on a small subset of lifelong real-world literacy skills, we noted how grades, essentially meaningless and arbitrary numerical assessments, have become the currency of education. One participant in the discussion reminded us how GPA affects college admissions and financial aid packages. This awareness led us back to the important principle that learning literacy is a developmental process--that despite all of the standards set for certain grade levels, in reality, people can learn or improve literacy at any age. We revisited the important elements of writing instruction that can foster substantial improvement: (1) write a lot; (2) write about something you care about; (3) write to communicate. We linked this approach to writing instruction to the ways we'd work with students who didn't read well and/or didn't like to read, noting that our top priority would be to find texts that those students would find interesting. That affective dimension of literacy learning plays a far more important role than our standardized-test promoters will acknowledge.

Because it is so important that we devote adequate time to helping students care about writing and find ways to use writing to accomplish their purposes--like getting the school picnic organizer to provide food for the vegetarian students!--we know that we must work against conventional wisdom in planning for writing instruction. And I mentioned that at the end of the semester, we'll be talking about professional communities and staying in touch with other people who believe in giving students choices in their writing and ownership of their texts, once we all go our separate ways, possibly into schools that don't support best practices for literacy instruction!

That's my summary of what we talked about today. Many people volunteered, and I suspect the conversation will continue in the logs students are keeping for this class. I hope my students will review this post and add to what I've said here--qualifying, correcting, and reflecting on our discussion.