Tutorials

During the week before project 3 was due, I scheduled the students for conferences with writing tutors. The tutors were students in The Teacher Preparation Program, a graduate-level writing instruction practicum course that I teach in the Ball State Writing Program. New graduate teaching assistants in our program take Teaching English in Higher Education, a composition theory course taught by the director of the Writing Program, and Teacher-Prep, a practical course for teaching in our department, which I teach as the assistant director of the Writing Program. In addition to creating course syllabi, designing teaching materials, practicing teaching, and taking part in a teacher mentoring program, the students practice writing center-style tutoring with first-year writers, both in the Writing Center and on the MOO. Earlier in the semester, each of my students met face-to-face with one of the graduate tutors, and during project 3, each student met online with a tutor.

I collected each student's draft during the week before they met with the tutors, and I delivered the MOO logs to the students the following week. Before they finished revising the papers, they re-read and annotated the MOO logs.

Because there were six tutors and twenty-four students, I was easily able to schedule the conferences between five days. The sessions averaged about an hour and fifteen minutes apiece.