Anatomy of a Virtual Meeting
The pedagogical priorities of a Virtual Meeting are the same as any tutoring appointment. As a tutor, your goal is to specifically encourage the student to become a better writer as you work through a specific writing assignment. Just like all other kinds of appointments, this should be dialogic, collaborative process that draws on both your expertise as a tutor and writer and the student’s specialized knowledge of the content and context of the writing task.
However, there are some specific ways that the added technology of a Virtual Meeting influences how you can be an effective tutor through this modality. For example, the Whiteboard function provides you with many different ways to interact with the writer’s text.
What follows is an identification of the main elements of a tutorial session paired with feedback from previous online tutors regarding how Virtual Meetings as electronic media can influence each of those elements.
However, there are some specific ways that the added technology of a Virtual Meeting influences how you can be an effective tutor through this modality. For example, the Whiteboard function provides you with many different ways to interact with the writer’s text.
What follows is an identification of the main elements of a tutorial session paired with feedback from previous online tutors regarding how Virtual Meetings as electronic media can influence each of those elements.
Establishing rapport
- In most Writing Center appointments, there’s a natural period of small talk as you find seats and a student gets out his or her draft. In Virtual Meetings, perhaps because you’ve already glanced at the draft on the Whiteboard, there’s a tendency to jump right into a conversation about the writing. Try to ask at least one small talk question before the “official” appointment begins: “Are you enjoying this class?” “How’s your semester going?” “What’s your major?” “Did you watch the game this weekend?”
- Even though it can be easy to skip over rapport building, Virtual Meetings often feel more intimate than sessions at the main center or in satellites because you can see each other’s homes. You can professionally use this can help establish rapport--for instance, you might find yourself needing to introduce the student to your cat or observing the student’s roommate is studying in the background. This can be a productive way of genuinely acknowledging and showcasing personhood, however, don’t comment on anything that seems personal or that you wouldn’t discuss in any other writing center location.
- Remember to ask if a student has used the Writing Center before. If they haven’t, introduce them to other modalities: in-person appointments at HCW, drop-ins at satellite locations, Written Feedback, etc.
Setting Goals
- After you talk through what the writer wants to focus on and what you understand to be the highest priority given the context of the assignment, it can be useful to insert a comment at the beginning of the document that details what you and the writer hope to achieve through this session. You may want to write this, or you might ask the writer to insert this comment. Either way, it can be useful to have an established goal or two written down in real-time where both of you can see it and go back to it.
Talking About the Prompt
- If the writer has a link to an online version of the prompt, she can easily share it with you or paste the important information into the Whiteboard so that you can look at the prompt together. However, if the writer only has a print copy of the prompt, it is harder for you to look at it for yourself. As such, in this situation you may need to ask more questions about the prompt or have the writer read sections of it aloud so that you are sure you understand the expectations for the text.
Reading the Paper
- Remind students that you may highlight or otherwise mark the Whiteboard as they read aloud. Without this reminder, sudden highlights can be distracting.
- If you happen to have a loud keyboard (or there is some unavoidable noise in the background on your end) and you intend to take notes on the Whiteboard while the student reads, you can mute yourself for that period by clicking on the little microphone in the bottom corner of your video screen. Just remember to 1) let the student know you may mute yourself, and 2) un-mute yourself when it’s time to talk.
Asking Questions
- If you’re asking a question about a particular sentence or paragraph, it is useful to highlight that text briefly with your cursor so a student can locate where you are in the text.
Brainstorming
- Some students enjoy working with bullet points or outline formats available through Whiteboard. Others may not think well in these predetermined formats and may find freewriting or conversation more productive. Ask students if they have a preferred brainstorming method. If a student prefers conversation, you might attempt “scribing” their ideas into a bulleted list on the Whiteboard so they have a record of what they generated aloud.
Working on Organization
- Especially in papers for introductory courses, it can be useful to highlight the thesis and topic sentences. This is something that you might want to do in order to show the writer what you believe their main ideas to be or that you might ask the writer to do in order to gauge his understanding of his own text. Either way, after these elements are highlighted, you can ask the student if these highlights feel like an accurate “skeleton” of the argument. If something essential for the argument is missing from these highlighted sentences, organization may need to be revised or ideas may need to be added.
- It’s particularly easy to try swapping the order of paragraphs on a Whiteboard: cut and paste (or highlight and drag) and try new orderings to see what works best for an argument. This is something that you might want to model and then encourage the writer to do on their own.
Working on Local Issues
If a writer’s original text was a Word document and they will ultimately be returning to that document, you may want to (or you encourage the writer to highlight) small changes made (new commas, deleted words, etc.) so they can replicate those in the original Word draft. Otherwise, short of cutting and pasting the whole document, it can be difficult to locate all of the small adjustments that were made over the course of a session.
Talking About Next Steps
If there’s time, students can write a “next steps list” at the bottom of the Whiteboard. You may even want to directly point the writer to this field and give him a few moments to fill it out before talking collectively about his plan moving forward.
Creative Ways to Use Whiteboard
- Direct your student to use the paragraph numbers and line numbers as much as possible, so that you both know which section of the paper you are looking at. Paragraph numbers and line numbers can be seen by hovering over the scroll bar on the left side of the Whiteboard.
- Explicitly encourage students to write on the Whiteboard (if they make a suggestion, say, “Great! Wanna make a note of that on the Whiteboard?”) to help students engage with the doc.
- Commenting
- You may wish to highlight text for discussion in bright colors as or after the writer reads. Sometimes this is faster than composing an entire comment, and yet it will still remind you of a specific place you wanted to call attention to.
- If you do provide comments, don’t get carried away with providing too many details. Things like, “Let’s talk more about topic sentences,” are great because they are quick and yet they remind you of a specific issue you’d like to return to. The comments on the Whiteboard when the writer is present in the Virtual Meeting should not be the same as the comments we provide via Written Feedback. Leverage the direct access you and the writer have through Virtual Meetings.
- You can reply to your own comments with transcriptions of the student’s responses. This way, your questions/comments are situated in the students’ text, as are their oral revisions, ideas, etc. However, the actual revision is still up to them--especially if you use shorthands, abbreviations, and so on.
- Make good use of the font-color options. This can be pedagogically productive because:
- The font-color option is easy to access in the upper ribbon on the page. When mid-conversation with a student, you don’t want to fumble around in the tool ribbon, looking for the right tool to highlight or underline a student’s text. Instead, you can simply tell the student, “This passage I am changing to the color red—let’s think about how this might be revised.”
- Using color coding allows you to move passages around or cut them from the draft while still keeping track of where things go. For example, let’s say you changed the entire introduction to a green font. You may remove a piece of the introduction and place it at the bottom of the essay so that it is out of the way. Should you wish to return that text back to the paragraph it belongs to, you know exactly where it goes without having to pause in the conversation.
- Colors allow the student to immediately see passages that require attention. Tutors have found that the students respond well to this little tactic, often taking the opportunity to color passages on their own that they wish to draw my attention to.
Google Docs Add-ons
NOTE: The Writing Center no longer uses Google Docs, so by extension we no longer use Google Add-Ons. But, we are keeping this section in the handbook because it is very informative (thanks to Lisa Marvel-Johnson!) just in case you would like to explore Google Docs a bit more. Add-ons are third-party plug-ins that sometimes require you to give the developer permissions that you may not want to give (i.e. access to your Google contacts). Generally, the more complicated the add-on, the more permissions they request. Be cautious and critical as you install and use add-ons! You can find more information about the potential safety hazards of add-ons here.
Add-on |
Description |
How useful for online tutoring? |
Reasons to use it |
SAS Writing Reviser |
Allows you to pick a category you want to work on (e.g. sentence economy, sentence variety, sentence power, etc.). It highlights certain phrases/words associated with these categories. |
Very! |
This could be useful in helping students who really want to work on grammar to identify patterns in their writing or specific places where particular sentence-level issues are apparent (i.e. dangling modifers, passive voice, cliches, etc.). |
ProWriting Aid |
Produces a report with document statistics about a range of stylistic issues (i.e. overused words, readability, transitions, etc.) |
A bit, but SAS does what this can do in a way that is more immediately accessible to the writer |
This might personally useful towards the end of a writing process to see what kind of sentence-level changes could be productively made to your writing. |
MindMeister |
Creates a mind map that visualizes the items of a bulleted list. |
Somewhat |
This could be a quick and useful tool for brainstorming or visualizing a paper’s organization in a different way. The mind map isn’t interactive, but it does appear on the document whether or not the user has installed the add-on. |
Here is a writing-related add-on that have not been tested by the online staff but that might be useful for these tutorial sessions: Brainstorming Race.
Here are some writing-related add-ons that online staff members have tested but found to be not useful for these tutorial sessions: Read and Write Extension, scrible Writer, Sorted Paragraphs, Revision Assistant.
Here are some writing-related add-ons that online staff members have tested but found to be not useful for these tutorial sessions: Read and Write Extension, scrible Writer, Sorted Paragraphs, Revision Assistant.
Tools Not to Use
Don't make unattributed edits to the document.
If you’re going to write directly in the document or recommend a change, make sure that you highlight your text or change the color of your font.
Don’t use the “Suggesting” feature to make changes that the writer can simply accept (like “Track Changes” in Word).
“Suggestions” can be used to write notes or insert questions or provide multiple options for changes, but don’t just “fix” the writer’s text like a copy-editor.
If Whiteboard isn’t the best for a given situation...
You may at some point work with a student whose work cannot be pasted into the Whiteboard (e.g., they are working on a CV, and formatting is one of their concerns). In these cases, you might want to simply have the student email/transfer the file to you. If the student sends the file, you may need to put even more effort into encouraging the student to mark up their document on their own device.
I'm here for you. Anytime. Seriously. |