23rd April 2012 12:16
By Blue Tutors
Student tutors
Hartford local paper, The Courant, reports a story where students are engaging in peer-tutoring schemes.
“Sixth-grader Jacob Rupert's writing assignment was a challenge: Write a paragraph on the topic of his choice without using the letter "d." Jacob had chosen to write about the aroma of pies, but he couldn't use the word "smelled."
Newly minted as a student writing tutor, Teagan Fransen, also a sixth-grader at Ashford School, sat with Jacob and politely asked him what he thought he could do to make his paragraph more concise. She offered him some tips on word choice and complimented his sentence structure.”
What the new young tutor is doing here, is what every good tutor should do, teaching the student how to criticize their own work. Enabling a student to be able to look through and ‘mark’ their own work is a fantastic way of teaching a student how to help themselves. In learning how to become a tutor, Teagan will also become a better student herself, looking at her own work through a teacher’s eyes rather than those of a student hurrying to complete a homework assignment.
I think it’s a great scheme and it’s certainly a great way of teaching students to read critically.