Consultation Reports – Brief Overview

Consultation reports provide you with a chance to reflect critically on each consultation. This allows you identify what tutoring strategies worked particularly well, where you can improve in future sessions, and so on. It also gives us an online forum through which we can share and learn from one another’s experiences.

Your reports should record whatever details of a session you think are most illuminating and should also reflect what you think the student has learned, what you may have learned about writing or tutoring, and what kinds of questions the session raised for you. We encourage you to explore past reports whenever you’d like. This can be a great way to learn about strategies that other Fellows use and to get a sense of the range of writing issues that come up in Writing Center consultations.

The report form includes:

• A space for general comments.
• Assessment: What did the student identify as the key problem to address? Was there any relevant feedback from his or her professor? How did your assessment mesh with these?
• Approach: What tutoring strategies did you employ, and how successful were they? How did you and the student balance your participation? Did the student seem ready to continue working on the paper after the consultation?
• Heads-Up: What else about the consultation or student would you wan to tell other Fellows who work with this student?

Pam, Stephanie, and the Head Fellows will review each report that you file on a weekly basis, and other Fellows who work with those students in the future will look at the reports to get a preliminary sense of what concerns to watch out for and what approach to take. Consultation reports also help us statistically to understand why and when students use the Writing Center, so it is essential that you fill in the basic information at the top of the form completely and accurately.

Theoretically, Fellows write their reports in the periods between consultations. Practically, however, this is usually not enough time. While we encourage you to get most of the crucial details down while they are still fresh in your mind, many Fellows find it convenient to set aside a bit of time to write and submit their reports during the 24 hours after a shift. We also know it can be difficult to find a balance between writing reports that are too brief and spending too much time on them. As you write up your report, keep your focus on what would be most helpful to the Writing Fellow the student next works with.

THE CONTENTS OF ALL REPORTS ARE CONFIDENTIAL, do NOT discuss them, even in the abstract, with people outside the Writing Center community.