Academic Service during 2006 | Professional Development Activities and Other Accomplishments during 2006
Professional Development Activities
2006 Conference on College Composition and Communication, Chicago
Other Accomplishments during 2006
Writing Center Director, Alma College
- Contacted previous tutors: I was appointed as Writing Center (WC) director but given nothing but a sheet with the names and numbers of previous WC tutors. I contacted them over the summer and opened up a dialogue with them to find out exactly what happened before and what I was dealing with.
- Surveyed faculty campus wide: I sent out a Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) survey to determine the needs of various faculty, what writing they assigned, and what services they would like the WC to provide.
- Developed workshops for tutors: WC tutors had never gone through any sort of training in the past, so I developed workshops for the tutors to run the first few weeks of the semester to give them some training.
- Read literature on writing center administration: Having no experience in WC administration, I felt it was important to read up on what WCs are doing these days and what would fit for our small WC and our limited resources.
- Contacted other writing center administration: Considering again my limited experience, I felt that contacting other WC administrators would be helpful in that they could tell me firsthand some of the things I could expect and share ideas and concerns with me.
- Interviewed for tutors: I advertised for tutors, scheduled interviews, and interviewed 17 students for the WC tutor positions, including those who had tutored in previous years.
- Hired staff: After conducting interviews, I chose from those who applied based on the interview, writing samples they had submitted, and their availability.
- Directed training sessions for tutors: When the semester began, we had several training sessions/workshops for the tutors. We covered everything from how to deal with grammar and punctuation problems to working with ESL students. We subsequently had one follow-up workshop every month thereafter.
- Developed and carried out extensive advertising campaign: The WC had a new location and a new structure, so we launched an extensive campaign to let the entire campus know what we were doing. This involved emails, flyers, bookmarks, and classroom visits where we talked about our services and anwered questions from students and faculty.
- Developed electronic submission option: Because we are small and are only open fifteen hours a week, one of our drawbacks was that we had no services available for some who could not visit the WC during our hours. In order to meet the needs of everyone, I developed an electronic submission option so that students could get help even when we were closed.
- Created website for writing center: A web page already existed for the WC, but it was very brief and limited in its information. I redesigned the website to make it more comprehensive, added a photo, and added the electronic writing submission option.
- Developed extensive record keeping system: Because I was starting from scratch, I felt it was imperative to make sure that better records were kept. So I have been keeping track of things like expenditures, hours of each tutor, and detailed student records of such things as the course they are writing the paper for (sorted by both department and by professor), number of visits per student, number of appointments made versus walk-ins, etc.
- Hosted a Writing Across the Curriculum Workshop for faculty:
This past month the Writing Center (me) hosted a WAC (writing across the curriculum) workshop where we focused on creating student-centered assignments and on assessment tools. The workshop was well attended (about 20) and well received. There have been requests for more such workshops. In the works are tech workshops for students who need help with things like PowerPoint, Word, wikis, imovie, etc. and tutoring group workshops modeled after the group conferencing I do in my classroom.