Add Learning Style to the List

If you looked in my The St. Martin's Sourcebook for Writing Tutors you would see written in BIG yellow highlighted letters, the word AMEN. This would be located on page 178 in the section where Shammon and Burns article entitled A Critique of Pure Tutoring says,
"...we find that the benefits of alternative tutoring practices are frequent enough to make us seriously question whether one tutoring approach fits all students and situations. Surely, students at different skills and accumulating different kinds of information, thus making them receptive to different kinds of instruction and tutoring."
Later they go on to say,
"If students are exercising different cognitive skills at different stages in their learning, it makes sense that they may be responsive to different kinds of information and tutoring styles at different stages, too. Our personal and WAC experiences suggest that, at the very least, for intermediate and advanced students, and perhaps on occasion for beginners, too, one tutoring approach does not fit all."
As much as it would make it easier to be able to tutor each student that comes into my cubicle the same and have it be effective most of the time, it is not realistic. Nor would it be interesting. And although the Writing Center and the students who come in into the Center are not there for my entertainment, it does help when there is variety. This helps me learn more about tutoring and all the different issues there are.
This also shows me that I have to stretch myself to figure out in a fairly quick span of time what might work best of the student. In trying to assess this, there is something that Shammon and Burns did not list in their essay as a consideration of what brings uniqueness to each student. That would be their learning style. All of us have certain ways that we learn the best. The most typical are visual and audio. Just talking to a visual learner is not going to be enough for them to learn what they should be doing different in their papers. They might get enough information in to 'correct' the paper in front of them, but it will not stick with them into the next paper, and they will be back the next time with the same issue.
Learning is what the ultimate goal is, right? I would love to see most of those that I have tutored come back and see me, and have had three do so. But what I would really love to see is them coming back with a different set of issues, and showing me that they have implemented what we went over the last time. So if in order to do that, I need to model exactly what they need to do, then I will do that. Not giving them the answers, but showing them what the correct way looks like, and doing it so that they can take it home with them to look at later as they process and practice what we have talked about in our short little encounter.
My favorite moment this week was with my most difficult session. A 'required' guy came in with his English 101 persuasive paper. There was only three pages and he needed at least 6 to 7. Although grammar was not what he needed help on, I still went ahead and read it out loud so he could hear his words instead of just reading them. For the first few paragraphs I stopped and pointed out different subjects in a sentence that could possibly be expanded on. By the second page of the paper I gave him the opportunity to say if he saw anything and he did! We talked through his different ideas, and he wrote and wrote, filling up two pages of the WC notepad. He had more than enough to research and reach 6 pages.
After we had gone over expansion, I asked if he had noticed anything else about his paper while I was reading it. He said he noticed that he was very repetitive, which he very much had been. I was proud of myself for not mentioning this during the reading, even though I really wanted to. But there had been signs that he was an auditory learner, and this proved that he indeed was.
Even more than this, I was excited about the session because as he left he almost smiled and said, "Thanks. I learned a lot." I got the feeling that this kid doesn't say very much that he doesn't mean. Usually the quiet ones don't. So even though he was not very talkative, and showed signs of not really wanting to be there, I am pretty sure he was glad he had. And I learned to keep silent about something because I had listened to my instincts about what kind of learner he might be. A great session is where both the student AND the tutor learn something!