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My Approach

My consultation model facilitates student success through collaborative dialogue, metacognitive questioning, and strategy acquisition. I honor that every student brings a richness of experiences, perspectives, and ideas to their writing process. In consultations, our aims are to facilitate students' discovery of and confidence in their own insights and their own voice, while also providing writing strategies that can transfer across different projects/courses and grow students' self-efficacy as writers, as thinkers, and as members of the academic community. 

5 CORE PRINCIPLES & PRACTICES

1 

I help writers, not writing.

I prioritize students’ long-term development as writers, not just their success on one assignment.

2

Writing is a mode of thinking, not just a means of expressing thought.

I want my students to experience the writing process as a means for transforming how they think.

3

I value the diversity of students’ identities and support students as they mature as unique writers and thinkers. 

My aim is to empower them to make informed choices about their writing.

4

Their insights, not mine; students’ work is their own responsibility.

I refrain from actions that would undermine academic integrity or deprive students of their agency over their writing and thinking; my role as tutor is to help the writer reach their own insights about what works and what can be improved in their writing and writing process– the tutor is not an editor.

5

Conversation creates clarity.

Conversing with writers about their writing helps them gain clarity about what they’re thinking and how to best express those thoughts to a reader. I facilitate the writer’s insights by focusing on a few key strategies in our conversations:

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  1. Supportive reader’s feedback— I help writers confirm or revise their own instincts about their writing by sharing an informed reader’s experience of their writing; whenever appropriate, I focus first on higher-order concerns (responding to the assignment, following genre and disciplinary conventions, presenting information logically and clearly, taking an appropriate qualified and complex position on a topic, etc.) before addressing lower order concerns (sentence-level mechanics, style, etc.);

  2. Asking the right questions— I model the kinds of questions skillful writers ask themselves to strengthen their writing so that students can analyze their own work more effectively

  3. Weaknesses through strengths— I help students recognize what is working well in their writing so that they can better see what can be improved.

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