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Chapter One: Tutoring Style, Tutoring Strategy: Course-Based Tutoring and the History, Rhetoric, and Reality of the Directive/Nondirective Instructional Continuum

I don’t want students to perceive me as having all the answers, yet very often I do have the answers they are looking for, and the students themselves know it ... What sort of message are we sending to the students we tutor if they perceive us as withholding information vital to their academic success?

– Elizabeth Boquet, “Intellectual Tug-of-War”

Familiar memes—don’t write on the paper, don’t speak more than the student-writer, ask non-directive questions—get passed among cohorts of writing tutors as gospel before they even interact with writers in an everyday setting.

– Anne Ellen Geller, Michele Eodice, Frankie Condon, Meg Carroll, and Elizabeth Boquet

Arguably, no single issue in writing center and peer tutoring theory and practice gets at the heart of one-to-one, small group, or classroom instruction as the question of directive/nondirective teaching methods. The question of how and when tutors (or instructors) should use techniques like open-ended (“Socratic”) questioning versus just telling students what they think they should do, or what the tutor might do themselves if they were in the tutee’s position, raises issues involving tutor authority, tutor-tutee (and even instructor) trust, tutor training (or “tutor education” or “apprenticing”), and writing process versus product—all relevant concerns in any writing instruction situation. However, when the rhetorical situation of typical one-to-one tutoring changes—when tutors, students, and instructors are brought into tighter instructional orbits—so too must typical instructional methods and styles be reconsidered. Further, add into the equation the fact that student writers, tutors, and instructors might have various levels of experience, preparation, and personality and things get even more dramatically complicated. This is the case in situations involving the closer collaboration of CBT programs. How can tutors and tutor coaches (directors, coordinators) adjust their typical tutoring and tutor training styles and methods to accommodate these sorts of multifaceted rhetorical situations?

In their 2008 College English essay, Elizabeth Boquet and Neal Lerner draw on critiques of Stephen North to argue that we need to be more open to experiencing two-way streets in theory, research, and practice—in short, instructional learning—between writing classrooms and writing centers. Lerner argues further in his 2009 The Idea of a Writing Laboratory that writing centers can be much more than physical places or removed sites for tutoring. Writing center theory and practice can branch out into many methods and forms for pedagogical experimentation. He writes, “Rather than a classroom teacher acting as expert witness, jury, and judge in evaluation of students’ writing, writing centers have long offered themselves as nonevaluative, relatively safe places, as experiments in the teaching of writing” (15). But what happens when a tutor travels from that relatively “safe” center to the forbidding land of the “expert” classroom teacher? My experimental research and practice on CBT since 2000 has led me to important questions this chapter addresses: How and in what ways can what we know about the rhetoric of peer tutoring styles and methods from writing fellows, supplemental instruction, writing groups, and teaching one-to-one be applied and studied. Then how and why might we share these finding with all teachers of writing? The rhetoric of the directive/nondirective instructional continuum—so often debated, refined, and even resisted in writing center and other peer tutoring circles—offers much in terms of teaching philosophy, holds great practical and critical promise, and needs to be shared with all teachers of writing. In many ways, the focus on how participants negotiate the directive/nondirective continuum offers immense teaching, learning, and communicative implications. Like Harry Denny, I am interested not only in the pragmatics of peer-to-peer teaching and learning, but what these pragmatics might reveal in terms of the bodies (minds) and politics of the various social actors in these collaborative learning ecologies. How and why can purposefully withholding knowledge from a student—in order to activate their own critical and creative powers—affect the teaching-learning dynamic? When and in what ways can simply telling students or tutors what they should or must do be more or less beneficial?

Much has been written on the nondirective or minimalist tutoring approach (see, for example, Ashton-Jones; Brooks; Harris, Teaching One-to-One) and subsequent critiques of this approach (see Clark “Collaboration,” “Perspectives”; Clark and Healy; Shamoon and Burns; Grimm; Boquet “Intellectual,” Noise; Carino; Geller et al.; Corbett, “Tutoring,” “Negotiating”; compare to Gillespie and Lerner’s notion of control/flexibility). I will begin by analyzing several key texts that comment on and critique general assumptions and influential arguments surrounding this debate, including Irene Clark and Dave Healy’s 1996 “Are Writing Centers Ethical?” and Peter Carino’s 2003 “Power and Authority in Peer Tutoring.” I will move on to review texts that use empirical case-study research in their arguments that CBT contexts demand a close reconsideration of the typically nondirective, hands-off approach to tutoring. Finally, foregrounding the case studies in Chapters Two-Four, I will begin to illustrate in this chapter why—precisely because the idealistic notion of “instructional flexibility” is easier said than done—arguments involving tutoring style, via the directive/nondirective continuum, offer important analytical lenses with which to scrutinize the “play of differences” that occur in various CBT situations.

“Really Useful Knowledge”: The Directive/Nondirective Instructional Continuum and Power and Authority

When diving deeply into a discussion of directive/nondirective tutoring, we soon begin to realize that—as in any educational situation—we are dealing not just with methodological-instructional, but also political and personal, issues. Clark and Healy track the history of the nondirective (or noninterventionist) approach in the “orthodox writing center.” They describe how in the 1970s and early 1980s, in response to open admissions, writing centers began to replace grammar drills and skills with what would become the HOCs/LOCs approach to tutoring. Along with this new instructional focus, however, came a concurrent concern—fear of plagiarism. The fear of plagiarism goes hand-in-hand with the issue of intellectual property rights—or students’ rights and ownership of their own ideas and writing—a political and personal issue pertinent to tutors, students, instructors, and program directors. As we mentioned in the Introduction, this “concern with avoiding plagiarism, coupled with the second-class and frequently precarious status of writing centers within the university hierarchy, generated a set of defensive strategies aimed at warding off the suspicions of those in traditional humanities departments” like English (Clark and Healy 245; also see Nelson and Garner). For Clark and Healy, the resulting restraint on tutor method soon took on the practical and theoretical power of a moral imperative. They describe how influential essays from Evelyn Ashton-Jones, Jeff Brooks, and Thomas Thompson cemented the hands-off approach to one-to-one instruction.

Ashton-Jones juxtaposed the “Socratic dialogue” to the “directive” mode of tutoring. Drawing on Tom Hawkins, she characterized the directive tutor as “shaman, guru, or mentor,” while Socratic tutors are given the more co-inquisitive label “architects and partners.” Practitioners were left to wonder if it could be a good or bad thing if a tutor-tutee relationship develops to the point that the tutee looks to the tutor as somewhat of a “mentor.” (And in CBT situations, especially, as we will discuss below, programs are designed with this question in mind since peer mentorship occurs on a regular basis.) Brooks, in arguing that students must take ownership of their texts, associated directive tutors with editors, good editors perhaps sometimes, but editors nonetheless. Brooks goes so far as to advise that if a tutee seems unwilling to take an active role in the tutorial, that tutors simply mimic the tutee’s unengaged attitude and action. And Thompson urged tutors to avoid having a pen in hand during tutorials. In the name of the Socratic method, he also urges tutors “not to tell students what a passage means or give students a particular word to complete a thought” (Clark and Healy 246).

In an ironic twist, Clark and Healy note that “by being so careful not to infringe on other’s turf—the writer’s, the teacher’s, the department’s, the institution’s—the writing center has been party to its own marginality and silencing” (254). In answer to this perceived marginality and silencing, they offer essays by Marilyn Cooper, Shamoon and Burns, and Muriel Harris, as well as the work of Lev Vygotsky, that value the pedagogical feasibility of modeling and imitation and an epistemological continuum that moves writers outside their texts to some degree. Cooper, for example, in her close reading of Brooks, argues that tutors who focus too intently on students’ papers may be missing out on important chances to help students with important, more general writing issues like how the course is going in general or how to approach assignments in creative ways. For Cooper, and others, a strict minimalist approach forecloses the act of negotiation—the “really useful knowledge”—that could take place in a one-to-one, negotiation that takes both the tutor’s and the tutee’s goals into consideration.

Peter Carino urges writing center personnel to reconsider the importance of the too-often vilified directive tutor. Like Clark and Healy, he sets up for critique the idea of interventionist tutoring as anathema to the strict open-ended questioning style advocated by Brooks. Carino then discusses Shamoon and Burns’s “A Critique of Pure Tutoring” in which the authors explain how master-apprentice relationships function in fruitful and directive ways for art and music students. In the master-apprentice relationship, the master models and the apprentice learns by imitation, from the authority of the master artist, the tricks of the trade. In that essay, Shamoon and Burns also suggest the importance of imitation to classical-rhetorical education. Reflecting on Clark and Healy’s essay, Carino concurs that nondirective approaches are defense mechanisms resulting from the marginalized history of writing centers within the university and their subsequent paranoia over plagiarism. Further, Carino applauds how Nancy Grimm advocates the directive approach so that traditionally marginalized or under-prepared students are not barred from access to mainstream academic culture. (I will continue this discussion below.)

Conclusively, Carino suggests a dialectical approach to the directive/nondirective dilemma, implying that directive tutoring and hierarchical tutoring are not synonymous:

In short, a nonhierarchical environment does not depend on blind commitment to nondirective tutoring methods. Instead, tutors should be taught to recognize where the power and authority lie in any given tutorial, when and to what degree they have them, when and to what degree the student has them, and when and to what degree they are absent in any given tutorial. (109)

He offers a seemingly simple equation for when to be direct and when to be nondirect: the more knowledge the student holds, the more nondirective we should be; the less knowledge the student holds, the more directive we should be. (Suggesting the roles specialist and generalist tutors might also play.) He wisely, affectively qualifies this suggestion, however, by stating that shyer but more knowledgeable students might need a combination of directive prodding to urge them to take responsibility for their work and nondirective questioning to encourage them to share their knowledge, while chattier but less knowledgeable students could benefit from nondirective questions to help curb hasty, misdirected enthusiasm, and directive warnings when they are making obviously disastrous moves. Unfortunately, Carino does not also characterize what to do when the tutor holds more or less subject matter or rhetorical knowledge, or when the tutor is shyer or chattier. And this is where current research in CBT can help explore this question. And this is also where the terms directive/nondirective can be compared to other closely related pedagogical concepts like control/flexibility (Gillespie and Lerner). Interestingly, Carino points to the dichotomy of power and authority that has historically existed between the classroom and the center, complementing and amplifying Clark and Healy’s notion of fear of plagiarism. Because centers have a “safe house” image compared to the hierarchical, grade-crazed image of the classroom, writing center practitioners feel the need to promote a nondirective approach, which they view as sharply contrasting the directive, dominating, imposing nature of the classroom. This attitude has led to some pretty confining dictums—like tutors not holding a pen or pencil in their hand—that can unintentionally hinder helpful teaching and learning.

A minimalist philosophy may sometimes actually cause tutors to (un)intentionally withhold valuable knowledge from students. Muriel Harris recounted in 1992 how a student rated her as “not very effective” on a tutor evaluation because she was trying to be a good minimalist tutor; the student viewed her as ineffective, explaining, “she just sat there while I had to find my own answers” (379). Although we could certainly question the student’s perceptions, the fact that one of writing centers’ most valuable players, admittedly, might sometimes drop the ball prompts us to continue questioning the writing center’s dualized directive/nondirective philosophies. Yet if we do a double-take on Harris’s views on this issue, we see that she has always seen both approaches as important. Clark and Healy point to an earlier work of Harris’s from College English in 1983 “Modeling: A Process Method of Teaching” in which Harris advances a much more directive approach. In describing the benefits of intervening substantially in students’ writing processes Harris asks “what better way is there to convince students that writing is a process that requires effort, thought, time, and persistence than to go through all that writing, scratching out, rewriting, and revising with and for our students?” (qtd. in Clark and Healy 251; emphasis added). Harris, early on, like Shamoon and Burns, understood the value and importance of the ancient rhetorical tradition of modeling and imitation in the service of invention and style. In order to perform such moves as “scratching out” and “rewriting” tutors must have some confidence in their ability (the theoretical and practical feasibility and kairotic timeliness involved) in offering more directive and traditionally “risky” and potentially intrusive suggestions on issues of substance and style.

“What Sort of Message Are We Sending?” Toward a Humble/Smart Balance

The issues presented above—questions of tutor authority, role negotiation, and instructional method and style—while immediately relevant for CBT, also parallel important, somewhat more general, scholarship in writing center theory and practice and student-teacher writing conferences, scholarship with methodological strengths and weaknesses that reflect our field’s developing understanding over time. Laurel Black’s Between Talk and Teaching offers a rigorous examination of the assumptions teachers bring to one-to-one conferences with their students, assumptions applicable for all teachers of writing. Black opens her book with the concept of conferences as one-to-one conversations, which may or may not use the student’s text as the prime mover of conversation. Black points to Lad Tobin’s view of the genealogy of conferencing from “first generation” teacher-focused to “second generation” student-focused conferences in which both leave all agency in the hands of the teacher. What Tobin, and in turn Black, look to is a “third generation” of conferencing “that takes into account the dynamic relationship aspects of each writing conference: the student’s relationship to the text, the teacher’s relationship to the text, and the student’s and teacher’s relationship to each other” through conversation (Tobin qtd. in Black 16). But Black goes on to suggest the complexity of this ideal notion of conferencing when she writes: “Warning bells should go off as we read about conference ‘conversation’” (21). Black’s work on writing conferences offers a rich spectrum of both the larger rhetorical issues of power and authority in conferencing with an attention to micro linguistic features and cues. The strength of Black’s work lies in the acknowledgment and exploration of the complexity of conferences as a speech genre in which, as in one-to-one tutorials, a delicate balance is sought between conversational talk and teaching talk. Black sees the complex interplay between the cognitive, social, and linguistic as contributing forces—to varying degrees, at different locations, in specific moments—to the unstable speech genre that is one-to-one conferencing (echoing to some degree our discussion of the generic “play of differences” in CBT from the Introduction). Yet in Black’s analysis of conference transcripts we do not hear the students’ point of view, nor the instructors’, nor do we get any real sense of what the pre-conference relationship between the students and the instructors are like.

The work of Nancy Grimm, which also displays a concern for the cognitive, social, and linguistic forces in one-to-one teaching, has made a major impact on the ways writing center professionals (re)view their theory and practice. Yet, like Black, her research falls short of providing the surrounding contextual information necessary to make full use of her findings. Her conceptualization of directive/nondirective tutoring can also be held up to scrutiny. In her concise yet theoretically sophisticated 1999 Good Intentions, Grimm juxtaposes the implications of Brian Street’s autonomous and ideological models of literacy to the work we do. Arguing that our traditional hands-off approach to one-to-one instruction is often misguided, she writes:

Writing center tutors are supposed to use a nondirective pedagogy to help students “discover” what they want to say. These approaches protect the status quo and withhold insider knowledge, inadvertently keeping students from nonmainstream cultures on the sidelines, making them guess about what the mainstream culture expects or frustrating them into less productive attitudes. These approaches enact the belief that what is expected is natural behavior rather than culturally specific performance. (31)

Like Cooper five years earlier, Grimm calls for writing center practitioners to move away from a focus on the paper to the cultural and ideological work of literacy: negotiating assignment sheets to see if there might be any room for student creativity or even resistance; making students aware of multiple ways of approaching writing tasks and situations, making tacit academic understandings explicit; rethinking tired admonishments regarding what we cannot do when tutoring one-to-one. Grimm illustrates what a tough job this really is, though, in her analysis of Anne DiPardo’s “‘Whispers of Coming and Going’: Lessons from Fannie.”

While Grimm, drawing on Street and Delpit, forcefully argues for the importance of moving past our infatuation with nondirective tutoring, she may be inadvertently pointing to why it is also perhaps just as important for us to continue to value some of our nondirective strategies—suggesting the truly subtle nature of this issue. DiPardo’s essay describes and analyzes the tutorial relationship between Morgan, an African-American tutor, and Fannie, a Navajo student who just passed her basic writing course and is attempting the required composition course. Both DiPardo and Grimm speculate that Morgan’s repeated attempts to prod and push Fannie toward what Morgan believed was realization or progress, only pushed Fannie away from any productive insights. The tutorial transcript presented by DiPardo illustrates how Morgan dominated the conversation, often interrupting Fannie (though unfortunately we do not get micro-level analysis like how long pauses were after questions, etc.), how Morgan appropriated the conversation, attempting to move Fannie toward her idea of a normal academic essay. While this approach may ostensibly resemble the directive approach advocated by Grimm, Lisa Delpit, and others, what it leads Grimm and DiPardo to conclude is that tutors must be encouraged to practice “authentic listening”: “As DiPardo’s study illustrates, without authentic listening, the very programs designed to address social inequality inadvertently reproduce it, ‘unresolved tensions tugged continually at the fabric of institutional good intentions’ (DiPardo 1992, 126)” (Grimm 69; also see Clark “Perspectives,” 46). Ironically, listening, or allowing the student to talk a little more during one-to-ones to enable them to supposedly be more in control of the tutorial discourse, is one of—perhaps the most fundamental of—nondirective strategies.

Carol Severino, drawing on Ede and Lunsford for her 1992 essay “Rhetorically Analyzing Collaborations,” associates directive tutoring with hierarchical collaboration and nondirective tutoring with dialogic collaboration (recall Carino’s words above). But her analysis of two conferences from two different tutors with the same student points perhaps more emphatically toward our assumptions of what the ideal tutoring session is supposed to sound like. The student is Joe, an older African American returning student taking a class entitled “Race and Ethnicity in Our Families and Lives.” Severino analyzes the transcripts of sessions between Joe and Henry, a high school teacher in his thirties working on his MA in English, and Joe and Eddy, a younger freshman with less teaching experience. Like the sessions that DiPardo and Grimm analyze above, Henry uses his teacherly authority, from the very start of the conference, by asking closed or leading questions that control the flow of the rest of the tutorial. In contrast, during the session between Joe and Eddy, Eddy starts off right away asking Joe open-ended questions like how he feels about the paper, and where he wants to go from there. For Severino, this sets a more conversational, peer-like tone that carries through the rest of the tutorial. Although obviously privileging the nondirective/dialogic approach, Severino concludes by asserting that it is difficult to say which of the above sessions was necessarily “better.” The problem with Severino’s analysis, however, is that we do not get a clear enough picture of exactly what was going on during the tutorial. As with Fannie above, we do not know how Joe felt about the interaction. Perhaps he found greater value in Henry’s more directive approach. Further, we do not know what stage of the draft Joe is in in either tutorial (information that might have contributed to the level of directive or nondirective instruction). Nonetheless, the value in Severino’s overall argument involves her urging those who prepare tutors to avoid prescriptive tutoring dictums that do not take into consideration varying assignment tasks, rhetorical situations, and student personalities and goals—the “always” and “don’t” that can close off avenues for authentic listening and conversation.