Days and times taught & location of class: To Be Arranged
Phone: 826-5422 E-Mail: jmf2@humboldt.edu Website:
Mon. & Wed.. 11-11:50am and by appointment
"Either propose and develop a project (under direction of instructor) or perform supervised research on a project initiated by a professor." The project for this class is to serve as a tutor for students in basic speech classes and other students.
1. Identify strengths and weaknesses in an applied area of communication.
2. Gain a working understanding of how principles of communication operate in an authentic context.
3. Gain understanding of ways to help others improve their communication.
4. Gain
greater understanding of principles of public speaking.
There are no required texts or readings or other material.
Every department has mapped the seven HSU Learning
Outcomes to their courses. In relation to this particular course, any HSU
learning outcomes that received a score of a "2" or a "3" should be listed
here. The HSU outcomes are listed below:
HSU graduates will have demonstrated:
HSU graduates will be prepared to:
The
following are the minimum requirements for students engaged in tutoring as
detailed in the Communication Department policies at http://humboldt.edu/communication/docs/COMM-495-Policy.pdf
The instructor in charge of tutors may require more from the tutors.
1) Every
tutor must:
a) Hold an "office hour" for
at least one hour each week for "drop in" tutoring.
b) Contact and tutor students assigned for
appointments
c) Attend meetings called by the
tutoring coordinator
d) Engage in activities designed to (1) prepare
to tutor students and (2) promote the tutoring program on campus, including
visiting COMM 100 classes, instructors in other departments who require
speeches, the Learning Center, and others.
r) Turn in a journal of tutoring
experiences during the semester, including what was done during drop in time
and during appointments. The journal should include:
- the name of the student being tutored,
- which class the student is in and instructor's name,
- what help the student needed,
- what was done in the tutoring session, and
- a brief indication of the insights the tutor gained about public speaking,
critical thinking, oral interpretation, tutoring, general communication, etc.
as a result of the tutoring session.
The
journal should also include other tutoring related experiences, such as class
visits and what you do during your office hour when nobody comes for tutoring. That
should be something connected to making the student a better speech tutor.
e) Turn in a final paper summarizing
what the tutor gained from the tutoring experience. The paper is expected to
describe experiences as a tutor, describe personal reactions to those experience, and relate specific communication concepts
learned in other classes to the experiences. The paper is also expected to be
well written and accurately refer to communication concepts. You must name each
communication concept, briefly explain what it means, identify the class(es) in which you learned it,
and explain how it related to the experience of tutoring.
f) At the discretion of the instructor
of record, periodic face-to-face meetings may substitute for the final paper,
but all considerations explained in item "e)" would still apply to the oral
reporting.
1. Maintain
one hour each week of the semester as an office hour for drop-in tutoring. Be
in your "office," at a place on campus that you specify, during your
office hour. You are expected to let the instructor of record know what time
you'll be in your office, and where it will be, and your contact information so
it can be posted to the Department web site. You may have more than one hour of
office time each week, but once you establish the time you must be there.
2. Read
the Tutor's Manual from the Learning Center if you haven't already
completed it and if it is available. The information is currently (1/6/12) not
online but may be linked at http://humboldt.edu/learning/tutorial_services.php in the future.
3. Advertise
your availability throughout the semesters. Such advertising should include the
following at the very least:
- Contact COMM 100
instructors to let them know you're available as a tutor and see if you can go
to their classes to talk to their students about getting tutoring. When you go
to the class be sure to be prepared with your presentation so you give the
impression that you know what you're doing. Don't wing it.
- When you go to
classes have small handouts with your contact information and office hours on
them. You can run them off in the office of have the instructor or record run
them off for you.
- You should also
contact instructors in other departments to find out if they require speeches
in their classes and offer your services to their student.
- You may also
offer tutoring services to students in other Communication classes, if you
believe you have the ability to help them.
- It would
probably also be a good idea to regularly include
notices in the HSU Weekly Notices e-mail.
4. Contact
students requesting tutoring. Students who need tutoring but cannot go to
office hours will be directed to contact you in the manner you identify in
requirement #1. You will then contact the students and arrange appointments for
tutoring. You may think of other ways to make arrangements to tutor students
and you may use them as long as you run them by the instructor of record first,
so they know what's going on and can offer any suggestions.
5. Keep
a log of your tutoring activity. The log is the major record of what you did
during the semester, so an incomplete, inadequate, or poorly written journal
could result in a lower grade for the course. The point of the log is not to
make you keep records, but to provide evidence that you deserve a particular
grade. The log must include all of the following:
A. A log entry for each office hour, whether or not anyone
came in for tutoring. The time you spend in your office hour must be related to
tutoring; it is not a general study hall. (See point #6 below)
B. A
log of what you did to encourage students to use the tutoring service. Tutors
are responsible for developing efforts to make faculty and students in basic
courses aware of the availability of tutors, their purpose, how to get
tutoring, and tutor office hours. Tutors are responsible to coordinate their
efforts with other tutors, if there are any. This should include every visit
you made to classes.
C. A
log of what you did in each tutoring session, whether it was during your office
hour or a separate appointment. The log should include:
1. The
name of the student you tutor
2. The
class the student needs help with and the instructor of that class.
3. The
specific need the student has for help
4. What
you did in the session (which should be described in sufficient detail that
whoever reads the journal would have a good idea of what you did)
5. The
time the session started and the time the session ended. It would probably help
you to prepare a form with space for all this information to fill out for
yourself after each session, so you don't forget to include it all. In the past
a common weakness of journals and papers was a lack of detail about what the
tutors did and what they learned. If you do not provide detail your final grade
cannot be very high.
6. If
desired, you can perform a post review by contacting the students helped and inquiring
how their speeches went.
D. A reflective essay about your experiences during the semester that includes at least the following:
(Note: some instructors of record might approve of an oral report to substitute for the reflective essay)
1. What
you learned from specific experiences tutoring. The learning may involve
insights about communication, public speaking, or critical thinking, that you
didn't have before you tutored. It could also involve reinforcement of ideas
you already knew. It should also include whatever you discovered about the
process of teaching and your aptitude for doing it as a result of tutoring. The
higher scores will go to those essays that accurately refer to a variety of
specific communication principles so it is clear you are drawing from your
academic learning and not only your personal experience. That is an expectation
of field experiences in this department. The more you can do that the better.
2. A
summary of what you got from your experiences as a tutor during the semester,
what you wish you had gotten, what you would do differently if you could do it
over again, and other thoughts you might want to include.
6. If
you are not already very comfortable using the library resources typically used in lower division speech
communication classes (both print indexes and electronic resources) be sure to
go to the library and become more familiar with them. The department faculty
has expressed the need for students to receive more help in gathering
information for their speeches, so as a tutor you must be prepared to go to the
library (physically and virtually) and help them learn the resources. Time
spent going to the library to become more familiar with the resources should be
included in your log, even if it does not occur during your office hours.
7. If
no one comes in during your office hour you are expected to use that time
developing your skills and knowledge for tutoring. It is not expected to be a
general study hall. Here a few ways you might use your time; you might think of
others. First, you can look up and read articles pertaining to public speaking,
or other areas of communication for which you will tutor students. Use your
time to increase your expertise. You might also try to find articles in the
education literature about tutoring. You might get some basic public speaking
texts to find out what different authors say about preparing speeches. You
should review the RESEARCH ROADMAP information in the library web site at http://library.humboldt.edu/researchroadmap/. Be sure to include your review in your log. Second,
you can use the time reading course material (photocopy packets, texts, web
sites) being used in current Communication General Education courses, so you
are more familiar with what is being taught in the various courses. You can
contact the course instructors for this material. Other things you might do,
but may not be able to do while you're at your tutoring site, include becoming
more familiar with the on-line library resources and Web research resources so
you can help students research for their speeches and learning how to create
PowerPoint presentations so you can help students with them. Don't overlook the
possibility of finding example speeches on YouTube.
Whichever
alternative you decide to use on a date when no one comes to your office hour,
be sure to write about what you did in your journal, using the general
guidelines listed in #3 above. Make sure in your journal you explain what they
have to do with tutoring. Be specific! Don't just write "I read a textbook," but say (a) what textbook you read, (b) what material was
covered in what you read, (c) what you got out of the reading. Remember that
what you get out of a reading might be something you hadn't known before,
something that contradicts what you thought, something that confirms what you'd
learned before, etc.
8. If
you have any questions or need any advice you are expected to contact your
instructor of record.
Keep
in mind that the general rule of thumb for receiving SC 495 credit is you spend
approximately 45 hours for each unit of credit. That's about 3 hours per week
for the full semester. You'll only spend one hour a week in your office hour,
unless you decided to have more office hours, and the rest would be in
appointments, activities to try to get students to use the service, and
activities to develop your skills and knowledge. Since the number of people who
come in for tutoring is out of your control to a large extent (as long as you
made reasonable efforts to get tutees) It will be understand if your time
doesn't quite add up to 45 hours. By the same token, though, you may end up
going over 45 hours. Don't turn any tutoring away because you've completed 45
hours. I also expect that you will use your office hour for tutoring related
activities and that you will be available in addition to your office hour.
This
course will be graded based on the tutoring log and reflective essay (or oral
presentation). They are both expected to be complete and show that you have put
effort into tutoring and thought into your paper (or oral presentation). Other
expectations may also be considered, including dependability and the treatment
of students who come for tutoring, if they become issues.
An
incomplete is available only if a serious and compelling reason occurs that
prevents you from completing the journal by the end of finals week.
Week one: Develop the
necessary forms needed to keep a good log of all activities. These could
include:
Form
for tutoring sessions
Form
for noting all activity around contacting speech instructors
Form for noting all activity around contacting and presenting to speech
students
All forms should be approved by the instructor
of record.
Week two: Contact all Comm 100 instructors requesting to announce your
services to their classes
Start
collecting into one binder all their speech assignments for the semester along
with schedules
Week three: Try to
announce your services to all Comm 100 classes; begin
holding your office hours
Weeks x&y: Keep track of various instructor's rounds of speeches. Ask them to remind their students that your
services are available just before new rounds are beginning
Week seven: Schedule
a meeting with your instructor of record for an oral presentation of your
activities to date.
Week twelve: Begin recruiting
tutors for future semesters. Work with the Communication Club.
Week fourteen:
Schedule a meeting with your instructor of record for a final oral presentation
of your activities and
reflection on your semester's work.
Students are responsible for knowing policy regarding academic honesty. For more information, visit: Academic Honesty Policy at http://studentaffairs.humboldt.edu/judicial/academic_honesty.php or HSU Catalog.
Persons
who wish to request disability-related accommodations should contact the
Student Disability Resource Center in House 71, 826-4678 (voice) or 826-5392
(TDD). Some accommodations may take up to several weeks to arrange. Student Disability Resource Center information is at http://www.humboldt.edu/~sdrc/
Students
are responsible for knowing the University policy, procedures, and schedule for
dropping or adding classes. Schedule
Adjustments (Adding or Dropping) is
at http://www.humboldt.edu/~reg/regulations/schedadjust.html
Please
review the evacuation plan for the classroom (posted on the orange signs) , and review Campus
Emergency Preparedness or at http://studentaffairs.humboldt.edu/emergencyops/campus_emergency_preparedness.php for information on
campus Emergency Procedures. During an emergency, information can be found
campus conditions at: 826-INFO or Emergency Conditions at http://www.humboldt.edu/~humboldt/emergency
Students
are responsible for knowing policy regarding attendance and disruptive
behavior: Class
Attendance and Disruptive Behavior at http://studentaffairs.humboldt.edu/judicial/attendance_behavior.php