If your Latin is as rusty as mine is, that translates to “what is written remains, what is spoken vanishes into thin air.” As developmental writers, many of our students need to receive information multiple times and from multiple modes in order for it to move from short-term memory to long-term. I am frequently amazed in the Lab as I look around and see and hear so many wonderful and engaged conversations about writing happening in our small room. An absorbing conversation is one mode of learning information. But students also need to write down what that conversation has entailed. Try to find places during your tutoring session where students can write down some of what is being said. It might be a bullet point list, a few notes to themselves, or even some complete sentences. It might be handwritten or on the computer screen, in pencil, marker, or drawn out. What they write down is up to the students, but it is up to us to remind them to record some of those great ideas before the end of the session and before that often hard-to-capture writing vanishes into thin air.
I love the picture for this blog!I understand the benefits of writing down important details of conversations. I am a visual learner who lose auditory information if I don't write things down. For students, a lot of information is shared during a tutoring session. Asking to write information on paper will surely help once they leave the Writing lab, because it will act as a recap of the session. A student I worked with this morning liked the suggestion of writing info about what we discussed,strategized and created as an outline for his assignment. He said he could use a method like this in the future and with other classes.
ReplyDeleteGreat words of wisdom as always.
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