By Laura Widman, Hamilton College

An Opportunity for Growth

This past year, I designed fall tutor training with our WC director, focusing on creating opportunities to learn and build community around a central theme: Interrogating Power. I had led numerous trainings on multilingualism and metalanguage in tutoring, but this was the first opportunity I had to plan training from the ground up and to lead large portions of it myself. I was excited to explore training topics further outside of my niche, and to see how our new tutors engaged with training and our WC community.

While the training resulted in capable tutors and new conversations, tutor feedback painted a more complex picture. Tutors communicated that they found some components of the training unengaging, too broad, lecture-like, and underestimating of their capabilities. One session in particular, about which we were initially very excited, fell flat—a training on Brave Spaces (Arao and Clemens 135). Instead of encouraging tutors to extend their ideas of what our space could be, they instead found Brave Spaces to be out of touch with their view of tutoring and the support they wanted in order to navigate conflict and differences. I was puzzled by this—the idea of Brave Spaces aligned with our center’s philosophy on supporting different perspectives, built upon the theme for the year, and provided a framework for navigating difficult conversations—why did it not resonate in the ways I anticipated?

While initially disheartening, I recognized that receiving this feedback was a valuable opportunity I could not ignore. I chose to use a cornerstone of many WCs’ training, reflection, to better understand and connect with my tutors’, grow as a WC professional, and improve future learning opportunities. The following explores what my personal reflection process looked like, what I learned—about my tutors, myself, and the tools and approaches we rely on in the WC—and how tutor training in our WC has changed since.

My reflection process follows Gibbs’ Reflective Cycle: Description, Feelings, Evaluation, Analysis, Conclusion, Action Plan (Gibbs, 49). This model is particularly effective because the cyclical nature of the reflection cycle provides opportunities to reevaluate and continue growing with each year of tutor training. While the initial catalyst for my reflection is described above, tutors’ feelings on training, my evaluation of their feedback, and the analysis of my choices in designing and leading training are explored in the following section, Building Understanding. My conclusions and subsequent action plan from the reflection process is discussed in the last section, Turning Lessons into Action.

Beyond using Gibbs’ Reflective Cycle as my framework, the work of reflecting is highly individualized. Much of my reflective process is done through thought, slowly and silently. I find that taking deliberate time to consider what I’ve heard, my actions, and my thoughts mitigates rushed responses or actions that only patch over issues, rather than resolve them at the root. This approach also prevents some of the common initial responses to criticism—justification, defensiveness, argumentation—from coloring my response. I spent considerable time drawing connections between different tutors’ experiences and what I had observed during training and could reframe in a new light while reflecting. I also returned to my materials—lesson plans, resources, handouts, and visuals—to retrace my planning and design process. I often take careful notes on patterns and experiences and use a discussion-based approach to further my understanding of these discoveries. Discussions with my director, who often aids in my reflection process by both listening and giving input, helped me further clarify and interpret tutor feedback and my choices during training.

I am sharing my reflective process because I have struggled to find writing and anecdata from early-career WC admins on responding to and growing from critique, and I want our failures to be as comfortable to discuss as our successes. In your own reflection process, I encourage you to explore Gibbs’ Reflective Cycle alongside other models and modalities for reflection, and customize a reflective process that suits your experiences and desired outcomes.

Building Understanding

Reflecting on fall training started with ensuring I knew and understood tutors’ feelings. The sentiment that some of our training sessions had not been a positive experience came from just a few tutors, so we sought out further feedback from all tutors to make more informed decisions about our response. This started with our mid-semester check-ins, where we shared that we were aware of some of the issues with fall training and wanted to hear more. From these one-on-ones, tutors identified parts of training that devalued their voice and were disengaged from their interests. Tutors also communicated which sessions they found the most and least productive, which allowed us to start identifying patterns and shared perspectives. While this painted a clearer picture of their individual experiences with fall training, we knew that putting them in conversation with each other would tell us more about their priorities moving forward.

The need for tutors’ collective feelings led to a collaboration in December where tutors discussed with each other what they would like to see moving forward, both in content and how they learn and engage best. This discussion told us what topics tutors felt they needed more guidance on and also told us how they wanted to learn and explore these topics. What tutors wanted in spring training further contextualized their feelings during fall training, as we could draw comparisons between what they wanted and what they told us didn’t work. With a more comprehensive understanding of our tutors’ feelings, I moved on to evaluating the tutors’ experiences in training by separating the components of training into two categories: what didn’t work, and what did.

When evaluating what didn’t work for tutors, I found that much of their feedback pointed to one major issue: rigidity in format and structure. In format, tutors did not find lecture-style training, where most information was delivered via PowerPoints and from my base of knowledge, as helpful or productive. For tutors who felt they already knew the information being presented, this format felt disengaging and demeaning because there was no space for their input or opportunities to further their learning. These lecture-style trainings were also rigidly structured because of the density of information covered, which left little room for substantive discussion. This lack of flexibility hampered productive dialogue: there was less time to develop ideas and explore outside the bounds of learning outcomes, and less space for disagreement and new perspectives. While tutors consistently had things to say in discussions, their thoughts were not used effectively as an opportunity to learn, devaluing their voices.

Connecting this feedback to my own notes and memories of the Brave Spaces training clarified why it didn’t resonate with the tutors; that training session was used a lecture format to guide tutors from the idea of “safe spaces” to “brave spaces” and offered a minimal amount of time for discussion and input (Arao and Clemens 135). In addition to the rigidity tutors disliked, this training had been condensed down to just thirty minutes, from an earlier hour-long version, creating text-dense slides and minute-by-minute notes. This barely provided enough time to introduce the concept, let alone have a nuanced conversation where we could have learned tutors’ thoughts on safe vs. brave spaces, heard disagreements, and discussed scenarios where these ideas applied in the WC. With a rigid format and inflexible learning outcomes, the tutors’ learning processes and voices were deprioritized. 

Inversely, what did work for tutors was flexibility in format and structure, a feature shared across all training sessions that were given positive feedback. Conversation-based trainings where the tutors learned with and from each other were considered both productive and impactful, as they valued tutor voices, helped them build community knowledge, and let them guide the learning process. Experiential learning and space for tutor dialogue felt more applicable to the day-to-day of tutoring than the big-picture topics that were covered in lecture-format sessions. The training sessions that worked also featured more flexible learning goals, where tutors had more time to share their experiences and go off-topic if it was more relevant and helpful to them. This autonomy encouraged tutor engagement in teaching and learning the tutoring process, and valued their voice both as a tutor and as a resource for each other’s growth.

Mock conferences—a favorite among our tutors—offer the best example of our tutors flourishing with flexibility. Unlike the Brave Spaces training, tutors had three hours’ worth of mock conferencing during training and, beyond a partner and a paper, learning outcomes were left entirely up to them. The wealth of time given to mock conferences gave tutors the time to develop ideas, explore new perspectives, disagree with each other, and ask questions—all critical to engagement and active learning. Our tutoring approach is dialogic and tutee-driven, and mock conferences are no different, so tutors could learn more about the aspects of tutoring they want to focus on from each other. The time to learn at their own pace, the autonomy to guide the learning process, and a format that encourages active participation and engagement are features that made training both impactful and empowering to tutors.

After carefully evaluating the stark differences between training styles and outcomes, I turned inward to analyze why my formatting and flexibility varied so widely. Analysis, in Gibbs’ Reflective Cycle, is a space for meaning-making in the reflection process, so with a clear understanding of our tutors’ experiences in training, I returned to my training materials and took time to consider what motivated my decisions in designing and leading tutor training. Much of this process was done silently by reviewing my notes and asking myself why—why that structure, why that design, why that timing—to comprehensively understand my choices in tutor training design. While some of these were easy to answer, more difficult to answer questions revealed the factors that impacted tutor training’s variability across sessions. I further refined my analysis of the influencing factors on training design in dialogue with my director, who helped me draw thru-lines between my perspective and tutors’ experiences.

When analyzing my choices in designing the lecture-like, rigid training formats, I found that they were motivated by something we all face as WC administrators: a lack of time. Like many WCs, the amount of time we have for fall training is too little, just 2.5 days, and covering everything that I wanted our tutors to learn about, as well as what they had requested further training on, led to a structure that valued efficiency and directness. What I had failed to account for was that covering everything is an impossible task, and that in overvaluing efficiency, I had deemphasized time and space for tutors to learn from each other, grow community, and build their autonomy by letting them lead on training topics. Treating time as a tool for meaningful learning, rather than a hindrance to maximizing training, is a value I have learned to prioritize in designing future trainings.

While a lack of time was prevalent throughout, there were three superseding factors that motivated the design of more flexible training sessions. First, topics that I was more comfortable with had conversation-based formats because I was better able to guide a discussion and let tutors learn from each other, rather than explicitly instructing them. Second, topics that had been explored in past training sessions were less structured and more conversation-based because I could trust returning tutors to add to and guide discussions based on their past knowledge and experiences. Lastly, certain topics and training features, such as mock conferences, naturally worked best when experienced tutor-to-tutor, rather than having me involved at all, and these sessions were more impactful because of the tutors’ increased agency in learning. These factors, while not shared by all training topics, further solidified the need to trust tutors to guide, engage, and collaborate in their learning process. Centering trust for tutors in my future training design has helped prioritize impactful and engaging learning experiences.

Turning Lessons Into Action

I consider writing centers to be spaces in which critical feedback is welcomed, listened to, and applied, mirroring the tutoring process. When we train tutors to reflect on feedback and grow in their tutoring from it, we must hold ourselves to the same standards to improve our centers, improve ourselves, and demonstrate to our tutors that their consideration is a catalyst for change. By embracing critique as an opportunity for reflection, I was able to draw conclusions about what made tutor training effective: trusting our tutors to guide their own learning, engage with the material, and use our limited time in ways that were impactful. Our tutors’ participation in the reflection and development process confirmed these conclusions, as their consideration and honesty built my trust in them. The reflection process has also benefited my professional growth by building my resilience and responsiveness to critique and disagreement. Lastly, transparent communication and responsive action in the reflection process allowed me to make headway in earning our tutors’ trust as a supporter and resource for their growth and learning. Transparency around my shortcomings and my work to improve cultivated a WC environment centered on mutual trust and growth.

With conclusions drawn, our action plan involved placing more trust in our tutors to collaboratively design our spring training—they were invited to generate topics, suggest preferred formats and structures, and lead sessions on tutoring in their field of study. Sessions led by admin were conversation-based and reflective of our tutoring practices—no PowerPoints, minimal notes, no strict time allotments for topics and discussions. This created more space and time for tutors to discuss, share their perspectives, and disagree—and to explore that. Personally, I reset my training priorities: from focusing on how to use time most effectively to facilitating learning through discussion, experience, and community. The outcome was that training was more collaborative, tutors were more engaged, and the sessions led by other tutors received the most positive feedback. As we now design our fall training for the coming year, we are giving tutors more autonomy to teach each other, more space to learn experientially and as a community, and more trust in their dedication to our Writing Center being a place of growth, knowledge, and support.

For anyone interested in learning more about Gibbs’ Reflective Cycle,  the Reflection Toolkit from the University of Edinburgh is an excellent resource. 

Works Cited

Arao, Brian and Clemens, Kristi. “From Safe Spaces to Brave Spaces: A New Way to Frame Dialogue Around Diversity and Social Justice.” The Art of Effective Facilitation: Reflections From Social Justice Educators (1st ed.), edited by Lisa M. Landreman, Routledge, 2013, pp. 135–150.

Gibbs, Graham. Learning by Doing: A Guide to Teaching and Learning Methods. Further Education Unit, Oxford Polytechic, 1988.