Editor’s note: We would like to thank Shareen Grogan, Director of the Writing and Public Speaking Center at University of Montana, Missoula (Montana), for providing this piece. To contact the author, please email Shareen Grogan. If you would like to share your writing center’s experience during COVID-19, please submit via WLN.

                        Shareen Grogan

My motto has always been that we’d go where the students are. At my last institution, that frequently meant an office cubical off of the computer lab or desk in an open advising center. All we needed were two chairs, a table, a computer to keep track of appointments, and we were ready to talk with students about their writing. If students were online, we’d work with them online, using whatever web-conferencing technology the university provided.

At my new institution, going where the students are meant sending tutors to the library and to the Native American center to meet with students, in addition to our large space in the Office of Student Success and a nominal online presence. It meant evening and weekend hours, offering some drop-in hours as well as scheduled appointments. When campus shut down in April sending all university activity online, students were online so we went online, too.

Though some of the tutors were already adept at using Zoom, we spent our last in-person staff meeting and our first one in Zoom on training for online consultations. I showed tutors how to share documents, request control, type in the chat.

A distressing behavior that I’d noticed in face-to-face tutoring in my new center was tutors taking the student’s paper and reading it silently while the student looked at their phone, stared out the window, and waited passively for the tutor to finish. In training we talked about postures and non-verbal clues. We talked about reading aloud and other strategies for keeping the student involved for the entirety of their 30-minute sessions. I pushed tutors to change this practice. They nodded in agreement and went back to their habit spending a significant portion of the session silently reading the student paper so they could then tell the student what needed to be done.

Going online forced a change in that behavior. Even though Zoom allows tutors to take control of the document that the student has shared, the lag time is disconcerting enough to make them avoid this practice. We could ask students to email their papers in advance of the session or allow students to upload their documents in our scheduler (WCOnline) so it’s the tutor who shares the document in Zoom and maintains control over scrolling and editing. These options are discouraged, and the default is that the student shares their document in Zoom once the appointment has started.

Tutors, even those who’d been initially resistant to tutoring in Zoom, reported that students are more involved in their online sessions than they were face to face. I attribute this to the fact that the student maintains possession of their document. When the student shares their document in Zoom, they are in control of what is visible on the screen. There is no opportunity for them to sit back while the tutor reads because they have to scroll through the document to make the next section visible. The tutor has to ask the student to move about in the document—to scroll down to read further, scroll back up to review earlier text. This practice prompts the tutor to explain their understanding, where they have questions, where connections may not be clear. As a result, the student can see how a reader interacts with their work.

The transition to Zoom changed the ways tutors interact with students and their texts in ways that my admonitions had not. Before going online, tutors defended their practice of silently reading through student papers as being the most expeditious way of conducting a tutorial. Working online encourages them to consider more explicitly the motivations governing their behavior and that allowing students to see that how a tutor navigates through a student paper can be as instructive as the comments they make about it.

Nobody wanted campus to shut down or for tutoring to be exclusively online. But we have learned from the experience and are improving our tutoring strategies. This fall, as our university reopens for in-person instruction, the Writing Center will continue to go where the student are: our space in the Office for Student Success, in the Library, in the Native American Center, and online. As important as it is to go where the students are, it’s important to keep students with us as well. Whatever the modality our tutorials take, we will do better at keeping students actively engaged. We’ll be ready.