Institute/Session Summary:

Presentation Overview: Relevance and Delivery:

This presentation will trace the URI Academic Enhancement Center’s challenging and ultimately rewarding two-year effort to develop an authentic, reflexive tutor training program that is a.) fully grounded in our tutors’ evolving practice and experience as learners and our participatory-based organizational development model b.) in accordance with CRLA certification standards and guidelines for best tutoring and tutor training practices.  Our experience has yielded many valuable lessons on student, staff, and organizational learning and development and raises several critical questions for the field. Our presentation goals are to facilitate dialogue on developing more authentic forms of learning through participatory developmental and pedagogical models, and to support practitioners who wish to draw from these models to ensure that their processes are grounded in proven, research-based standards.

We will begin by outlining our Center’s vision, organizational development needs, and pedagogical philosophy and discussing our rationale for embracing CRLA standards for practice and seeking program certification. We will then present our training program’s developmental path in two ways: first, as an exercise in actively involving students as both learners and teachers in all three of the conference’s identified areas of learning (student, staff and organizational); and second, as a journey in addressing the complex experiences and issues in tutoring – one which gradually moved us further away from traditional training methods. Throughout, we will focus on the meaningful but often challenging and frustrating relationship between meeting the CRLA standards and guidelines and creating the program we envisioned, and illustrate how our experience increasingly enabled us to both appreciate the value and quality of the CRLA standards and the difficulty in adhering to them as our methods became more purposeful and powerful. 

Learning Outcomes:

We will invite participants to offer guidance to us and to one another, asking them to reflect on their own programs and practices and evaluating the strength of their training’s connections to the complex experiences and issue their tutors face in practice. In turn, will offer suggestions for learning assistance practitioners aiming to establish or improve training programs along similar pedagogical lines, including thoughts on recording and reporting according to certification guidelines. We will facilitate a sharing of ideas on how CRLA can best support learning assistance programs which seek to development authentic, participatory training models without weakening or compromising the standards the certification process upholds.

Handouts and Media:

Our presentation will use Powerpoint, overhead slides and accompanying handouts to present an overview of our training vision, goals and processes as well as program artifacts -- including overviews of our pre-service and ongoing requirements, notes from peer observations, group meetings and other collaborative activities, and excerpts from our tutor’s web-based discussion forum. We will also provide worksheets for reflection and questions to facilitate discussion.  Notes from the discussion will be recorded and made available for participants 

Background and Context: 

When the AEC was founded in 2003, its motto, Teaching is Learning, encapsulated its vision: to create and sustain a community where students could tap into their own collective strengths, knowledge and experience to take ownership of one another’s learning. Under a very limited budget, guided by a single professional learning specialist and staffed entirely by students, the AEC has used participatory developmental and pedagogical models to create a range of reflexive, authentic support services which address the needs and draws from the knowledge and ability of its student staff and clients.

Its peer-driven training program draws from tutors’ own knowledge and experience to effectively connect theory and methodology to practice. Several ongoing, dialogic processes engage tutors in collaborative reflection on their work and on their own experience as learners.  The center’s Graduate Assistant facilitates these processes, enabling further reflection, integrating learning theory and tutoring methodology where needed, and helping participants to focus on developing strategies and solutions.  The process optimizes tutors’ learning -- by introducing new theoretical and methodological concepts directly within the context of shared experience, the facilitator ensures that new knowledge is co-constructed and readily integrated, giving tutors a shared knowledge base from which to draw in their work.

This reflexive process ensures that overall program development also remains responsive to student needs. Outcomes from training activities inform subsequent training, program development, and policy making.  Through studying training activities and outcomes, the center is able to learn about how students are learning, and what they need in the way of support.  As awareness of student needs evolves, its ability to meet those needs improves. This new knowledge enables us to implement programs and services that are grounded both in current learning theory and methodology, and in the actual perceptions, needs and practices of the students it serves.  It also enables us to identify areas for action research aimed at better understanding students’ approaches to studying an learning.

Ultimately, we have found the CRLA guidelines useful in grounding our planning and establishing requirements.  In our view, the guidelines provide an excellent overview of what tutor training should involve.  Where we have struggled, primarily, is with matching our content delivery process to certification requirements. Our training process is intensive, enabling all staff to meet several levels of training requirements within an academic year.  While it enables more experienced tutors to function in support of new and less experienced colleagues, it is less heirarchical and sequential in terms of content and structure. and participatory structure.  Because CRLA requirements anticipate a different structure, reporting for certification has bee extremely difficult.  Additionally, the reflexive nature of our planning has meant that with each semester we have adjusted  our program.  This has required a semesterly revisitation of the application process. Our hope in this training is to work with  other organizations to refine strategies and suggestions for making this process easier.

Presenter1 Name: David Hayes
Presenter1 Institution: University of Rhode Island
Presenter1 Bio: David Hayes is the Director of the Academic Enhancement Center, the University of Rhode Island’s Learner Assistance Center.  He holds a Master degree in education from Harvard University and a Bachelor’s degree in Journalism from Suffolk University.  David comes to higher education from the adult education field, where he has experience includes working as a teacher, program coordinator, teacher development specialist, tutor trainer and consultant.  He has helped develop Rhode Island state standards for adult education, and worked on research-to-practice issues for the National Center for Adult Learning and Literacy’s Practitioner Dissemination and Research Network. David will begin PhD studies at URI in the fall, focusing on college preparation through K-12 curricular reform.

Presenter2 Name: Hillary Ornberg
Presenter2 Institution: University of Rhode Island
Presenter2 Bio: Hillary Ornberg is a Graduate Assistant at the Academic Enhancement Center, and the lead developer and administrator of the center’s tutor training program.  Hillary has also worked for the center as a staff supervisor and  academic skills tutor, and for the URI Writing Center as a writing consultant.  Hillary will graduate with a Master’s Degree in Literature in May 2007 and will enter the Harvard School of Education Master’s degree program in September 2007, where she will focus on language and literacy skills development.  Hillary also holds a Bachelor’s degree in English from URI.  She plans to continue to focus her work on college teaching and learning.