Nick Carbone answers the question(s) in two parts:(a) Chafing can occur, but the factors have more to do with time and personality. The consultants in my center only work for one academic year, so they aren't there as consultants all that long and the amount of online work is even less. They only work five hours per week in the WC or on WC related activities (workshops, doing online papers and so on). That's a strict limit because that's all they can get paid for. Even after a year, most are still not fully comfortable with online tutoring to have gotten to the point where they're unsettled by advice, either from an article or from a supervisory context (a.k.a me saying something).
I can see in other situations where that might arrive, but I think there are things to do that will mitigate against its happening.
1. Have tutors share their knowledge and evolving strategies regularly; have writing center director join in that sharing (to show we can all change and learn, but also because it's just a good idea).2. Encourage and provide time and support for reflective activities--tutoring journals, writing articles on experiences, asking for help and so on.
3. Be supportive and constructive in any critiques. Use PQS: praise, question, and suggest. Make the questions inquisitive more than interrogative and base the suggestion on the consultant's stated goals.
4. Invite consultant feedback on our own efforts. I ask consultants on occasion to look at online comments I've sent to writers to double check myself. Is this too long? Is it clear? Does it sound pushy?
5. Don't choose corrective articles, articles that are selected because they seem to address an issue or fault or deficit of some kind. That way you don't have a "we're doing this wrong, so read this" approach.
6. Reward achievement and praise good stuff.
(b). I think we move on the moment we start to practice. In the first few weeks of our internship course, students read a lot of stuff and we talk about the readings, but when they get into the wc and start tutoring, almost immediately they find things that applied and didn't apply, that they sort of did, but altered in some way from what the reading said. It's like following a recipe but swapping in ingredients or using a different type of cooking method or temperature. Pedagogy *is* practice. Reading about pedagogy is like reading about swimming or golf; it gives you some idea of what you might do and how you might proceed, a frame of reference, some confidence in that you know something, but all of that ain't pedagogy in the proper sense. It's prepagogy if you need to name. Pedagogy only exists really in the teaching moment.