I had the chance to observe a fellow tutor, Marina, and her Year 8 student, Rachel, in an English session. This session, Marina began by checking in with her student and looking ahead with her about preparing for the upcoming NAPLAN exams for Year 9. For preparation, Marina had tasked Rachel with a narrative writing task using a visual stimulus as a prompt for her homework. Marina went through Rachel’s narrative piece and discussed the feedback with her. She was really encouraging and motivating in her feedback, highlighting her student’s areas of strength, being her creative ideas and approach to the stimulus. Marina was also very detailed in her feedback about areas to enhance/correct being spelling, sentence structure, and word choices, working through the narrative sentence by sentence. For example, Marina highlighted that her student had great descriptive language however at times the writing was a little wordy and it in turn weakened her writing. Her student seemed to find this very helpful and quickly took on the feedback by re-reading her own work and making corrections.
Once feedback had been given, Marina then challenged Rachel with trying to adapt her already-written story to a new stimulus. This was with the intent of helping Rachel apply stimulus’ more efficiently and creatively, as if it was an exam scenario. Marina did this by reminding Rachel of their collection of techniques and creative writing knowledge compiled from over the term. She allowed Rachel some time to work on this task alone whilst she prepared some more feedback but checked in often. They then discussed Rachel’s ideas for the task and Marina provided feedback on how to be more conceptual rather than obvious when responding to a stimulus through creative techniques such as the structure of the story itself and using motifs.
Overall, I enjoyed observing Marina and was really inspired by her motivating and thorough approach to tutoring her student! I also liked Marina’s approach of allowing the student to work individually for periods and then discussing together the work that had been done.
Andrea Nouris
