Dropping Preconceived Ideas in Order to Help Writers Soar: Using Improv Techniques in Tutor Training

As stated in Steve Sherwood’s article, “Portrait of the Tutor as an Artist,” tutoring requires a tremendous amount of improvisation because tutors cannot be trained for every situation they will face. A tutor’s ability to be in the moment and avoid making assumptions about clients’ papers can allow tutors to help the writers to soar by leading them to more discovery, engagement, and confidence, but this practice can be difficult for tutors especially in busier times of the semester when they are seeing clients more frequently and when many of their clients may have the same assignment. Tutors may begin to make assumptions about a paper based on similar papers they have seen and inadvertently hijack the client’s paper. To help combat this mentality that grounds the clients instead of allowing them to soar, we began to incorporate various improv techniques into our tutor training--particularly techniques that employed active listening and staying in the moment. This presentation will discuss the multi-modal approach used to integrate the techniques into training, some of the specific techniques used, and plans for future training. It is my hope that participants will discuss similar techniques they use at their institutions, and we will talk about if/how some of the techniques we (or others) have tried could assist in their tutor training