Presenters: Leslie Kirshner-Morris, Joanna Labov
Audience: Faculty, Administrators

Learning Goals

Participants will:

• Learn the importance of collaborating weekly online with an assigned Leaning Lab tutor.
• Learn the importance of using collaborative tools to facilitate lesson planning, delivery, reflection and intervention.
• Learn how to improve their students’ reading and writing skills by collaborating effectively with an assigned Learning Lab tutor.

Seminar Description
The importance of the professor-tutor collaboration is not highly recognized. We will present the effectiveness of collaboration between an ESL Reading/Writing professor and a Learning Lab tutor. The tutor was assigned to the professor’s lower-intermediate Reading/Writing class. The importance of relationship building was an essential aspect of the collaboration. In addition, there was a commitment between the professor and tutor to plan the classes in order to meet the needs of the students on a weekly basis.

The collaboration between the professor and the tutor was effective because of their commitment to the Dynamic Assessment model (Gottlieb 2006). They used the model to plan the classes weekly, review individual student progress and intervene when needed.
They shared observations about the students’: 1) level of engagement in the class and tutoring sessions 2) progress in the class and 3) how to connect their funds of knowledge with course content (Moll 2013).

Participants will learn how to improve their students’ reading and writing skills by effective collaboration between professor and tutor. The collaboration model consisted of regular and consistent meetings between the professor and tutor to plan their lessons and to scaffold the information learned in class. The collaboration resulted in a holistic view of how to effectively plan in a way that was organic and synchronic. The tutoring sessions, which were once a week, occurred immediately before the professor’s first class of the week. The tutor prepared the students for the language and content demands of their Reading-Writing classes. A collaborative model of intervention was used by the professor and tutor to consider students’ life situations which might have impeded their progress. The collaboration resulted in mitigating the possible failure of students who were in danger of failing the class.