From: Danielle Akers
Date: November 26, 2014
Subject: Reflection on tutoring experience
Description of Student Writer & Learning
As a culmination of our sessions together, my student Alex (name anonymous) was able to create a
Character Collage Poster that demonstrates personality traits and backstory elements of a fictional
character he created with my assistance. To work up to this, I first exposed Alex to methods of
brainstorming to generate characters and their backstories for fictional narrative writing. In this same
session, we drafted a list of characteristics that authors use to craft fleshed-out characters, and we used
this list in our next session to start “seeing” from his character’s point of view. In this fourth session, we
utilized activities that allowed Alex to physicalize his character and thus begin to think as his character.
During our final session, we worked on a minilesson to help Alex differentiate between the forms
there/their/they’re, and then we together constructed the Character Collage Poster. As a final writing
activity, Alex captioned each of his chosen collage images with an explanation of his choices.
Even from my brief experiences with Alex, I know that he possesses several strengths as a writer. He
knows how to form complete sentences: his very first quick-write with me included the sentence, “I
started watching videos of boxers like Floyd Mayweather and even the all time greats like Muhammad
Ali.” Further, he is capable of writing compound sentences that utilize conjunctions, as evidenced in his
Character Collage caption that reads, “He is smart so he builds lots of things.” One of his quick-writes
included the sentence, “I love boxing because its a good thing to do if your stressed out, and I also just
love the sport.”
Although he is maturing as a writer, Alex of course still has several areas of writing that he could
improve upon in the future. First is his ability to stretch his perspective outside of his own experiences
and into those of another person. When we were brainstorming potential fictional characters, I saw that
Alex’s writing mainly consisted of items such as “[This person] has no homework,” “[This person] is
going to play football,” and “[This person] is getting a new bike.” While none of these ideas are bad, he
clearly was pulling only from his own life experiences; when I prompted him to think more outside his
own experiences, he struggled. I can see progress in him in this area, as evidenced by our physicalizing
session, but he still needs work to help him continue learning to view life through the eyes of others.
Teachers can help Alex with this area of improvement by giving him more opportunities to utilize
other perspectives. To help him continue growing in his ability to put himself in another’s shoes, Alex
needs more chances in the classroom to practice empathy. Activities such as the one I did with him,
involving on-your-feet embodiment of imagined characters, proved to be highly beneficial in stretching
his thinking. I also recommend small group literature discussions that involve students taking on the
personas of different characters, the author, etc. so that students are not arguing what they think but rather
are arguing what someone else thinks.
Reflecting on This Experience
I see my experiences with Alex reflected in Anderson’s ideas about the reasons behind students
making the grammar mistakes that they do: every student has “pseudo-concepts,” or “budding theories
based on initial impressions,” that cause them to make their conscious grammar choices (Anderson 4). In
taking time to listen to Alex about his reasoning behind there/their/they’re, which he explained by saying
that he could not see the difference between “there” and “their” but could easily identify “they’re,” and
his fears about using commas incorrectly, I better know how to instruct him and guide him to more solid
grammar concepts.
More importantly, my time with Alex has reinforced to me Gallagher’s ideas about modeling: it is “the
single most effective strategy” in getting my future students to become better writers (Gallagher 15). As
Alex and I worked through our quick-writes every session, I always modeled my thinking process out
loud to him, and consequently his quick-writes were often successful in terms of content. In contrast,
during our brainstorming activities I failed to model the thought process for brainstorm writing, and thus
the writing he produced was at a lower level than I had hoped from him. Had I modeled my thinking out
loud, showing Alex the ways I “wrestl[ed] with decisions as the writing unfolds,” his product would have
been better, and now I know for my future teaching that I must consciously model all the writing my
students will do.
I am confident that this experience will impact my future teaching in a variety of ways, but I will
discuss one major impact here: I have learned the importance of differentiating my lessons. Although this
experience only involved one student and thus offered ample opportunities for me to personalize lessons,
I will strive to continue to do so when I have entire classes full of students. By offering Alex choices in
his writing prompts and in his final project, I was able to differentiate with him on an individual level, and
I will offer the same amount – hopefully even more – of choice to my future students, allowing them to
select their own writing prompts, final projects, and even in-class novels to be used in lit circles. Meeting
with Alex and getting a chance to see the act of writing through his eyes made me realize just how
important this differentiation is between students, because if I had not allowed Alex to choose his final
project or if I had forbade him from writing about his favorite sport (boxing), he would have not been as
interested in our sessions as he was.
Works Cited
Anderson, Jeff. Mechanically Inclined. Portland, Maine: Stenhouse Publishers, 2005. Print.
Gallagher, Kelly. Write Like This. Portland, Maine: Stenhouse Publishers, 2011. Print.