A Social-Work Model for Writing Centers

Dean Ward and Jodi VanWingerden

Calvin College Rhetoric Center

A model for social work, a "solution-building" model that shares fundamental assumptions and goals of writing-centers, offers training tools and systematic interviewing procedures that may help us to better accomplish our goals.

This social-work model is articulated in a new book by Insoo Kim Berg and Peter DeJong (Interviewing for Solutions, Brooks/Cole, 1997); it is also being developed in other venues–Berg, for example, has recently been granted a three-year government contract to retrain social workers in the new interviewing strategies. The model stands on two assumptions that it shares with current writing center theory and practice: (1) social-work clients know more about their problems than do their social workers, and (2) those clients know more about their problems than they realize they know. Consequently, the task of the social worker is not to diagnose and prescribe cures for clients’ problems (the medical, problem-solving model that has long guided social-work practice). Rather, the social worker elicits clients’ active participation in "building solutions" for themselves.

These two assumptions are already widely accepted among those who work in writing centers, and principles of non-directive tutoring have long been a focus of the training in our writing-center. But our tutors, especially when facing students who seem unwilling to work collaboratively, often fall back on instincts that drive them to prescribe cures for students’ rhetorical ailments. The strategies of Berg and DeJong’s social-work model grow out of years of inductive studies, and their model suggests a methodology that writing center staff can use to shape their instincts to the dynamics of collaborative learning. What follows is a sketch of the model and our experiments with it.

General Strategies and Questions. In general, the model proceeds through five steps; the bulleted items under each step exemplify the kinds of interviewing strategies used. Although the strategies of the solution-building model can be used in brief sessions, the model presumes multiple meetings (knowing this will help to make sense of the following description).

1. Describing problems: the goal is to get clients to describe, in detail, their problems.

•The "not-knowing" posture–interviewers must ask questions as if they know nothing about a client’s problems.

•Echoing key words–simply repeating a client’s words will usually elicit elaboration.

2. Developing goals: with a description of problems on the table, interviewers encourage clients to develop concrete, realistic goals for solving their problems.

•The "miracle question"–"If a miracle were to happen while you sleep tonight (the miracle being that all your problems were solved), what specific differences would you notice in the morning that would tell you the miracle had occurred?" This question (about which whole seminars are now being held) asks clients to focus on concrete changes that they want to establish as goals.

•The vacation planning metaphor–if clients think of solution-building as going on a trip, they can ask what’s at their destination that they want, again voicing goals.

3. Exploring for exceptions: recognizing times at which problems were nonexistent or less severe can open possibilities for constructing solutions.

•Scaling questions–asking questions such as "On a scale of one to ten, how bad is your problem now? How bad was it before you came in?" helps draw clients toward recognizing exceptions.

•The vacation planning metaphor–as a follow-up question to "What’s there that you want?" ask "How do you get there?"

•The who, what, when, and where of exceptions–interviewers should encourage clients to specify as much as possible about each exception, which may enable clients to realize what they can do to repeat the exception.

4. Devising feedback: in addition to reinforcing ideas or summarizing the content of a session, feedback can suggest tasks for clients to complete on their own.

•Compliments–vocal applause, even for the smallest thing, sharpens clients’ focus on their strengths.

•"Bridges"–these are comments that connect a compliment to a task, e.g., "Because you are clearly able to build a good outline, let me suggest that you ___ before our next meeting."

•Tasks–these may be observational or behavioral, depending on the working relationship between client and interviewer (examples appear in the next section–"Types of Clients").

5. Measuring progress: measurement allows clients to evaluate successes, and it encourages continued work on solutions.

•Recognizing progress–assessment begins with recognizing progress, focusing on clients’ successes and strengths.

•Scaling questions–in the same way scaling questions illuminate exceptions, questions such as "What happened to allow you to move up a point on your assessment scale, and what could you do to move up another point?" can shed light on progress.

•"What’s better?" questions–these are simpler versions of scaling questions, asking clients to identify an area in which something is better than it used to be.

The stages above indicate that this model anticipates a patient, often lengthy, process. In writing center work, a strong point of such a process is that it emphasizes long-term improvements more than improvements on a single paper.

Types of Clients. In addition to the techniques outlined above, the model suggests specific approaches to different kinds of clients. The staff of our center became interested in this model when we were discussing some especially difficult kinds of students who visit our writing center. The model attracted us because we had to admit that we sometimes fall back on instincts that grow out of a need to provide expertise or to escape trouble. When we asked each other what we do when, for example, a student comes in spitting venom, we swallowed our pride, regurgitated our shame, and admitted that we might:

•read the paper, decide how it might be "fixed," and start outlining a new organization for the student–tutor as divine physician;

•retreat to the relative safety of grammar and mechanics, plodding through obvious sentence-level errors and ignoring more significant global problems–tutor as coward;

•point out problems and tell students that they simply must come up with their own solutions–tutor as tough lover;

•attack selectively, "fighting the battles you can win"–tutor as military strategist.

As we practiced working with the solution-building model, we developed a greater commitment to avoiding these negative responses and more confidence that we could work with even the most resistant students.

Two particular types of difficult clients in our writing center–students who are forced to come to the center even though they do not believe they need help and those who know they have problems but tend to blame them on bad teachers and assignments–are essentially the same as those that Berg and DeJong identify as "visitors" and "complainants."

Visitors. These are people who are not willing or able to identify their problems; typically, they have been coerced into visiting a social worker or writing center, and they can be reluctant or even hostile. To begin working with such individuals, Berg and DeJong suggest paying attention to their perceptions of themselves, their circumstances, and what they want (e.g., ask questions such as "What would it take to get what you want?" or "What will your teacher say has to happen for you to get what you want?"). These people should then be held accountable for their perceptions; in other words, if a student disagrees with his teacher’s suggestion that his organization needs revision, he may say something like, "I’d be better off if I didn’t think about organization at all"; the tutor might then ask, "What tells you that you’d be better off by doing that?" The question does not challenge the student’s perception of the truth; rather, it asks the student to project the consequences of believing what he or she claims to believe. Tutors should not assign tasks to work on before the next tutoring session until student and tutor can jointly identify a problem. The tutor can only listen carefully, respect the student’s perceptions, and offer compliments when possible.

Complainants. "Complainants" may recognize problems in their writing, but they do not see a role for themselves in building solutions because the problems come from outside themselves (e.g., "My teacher’s expectations are unreasonable." "My teacher is unclear." "My teacher doesn’t like me." "The assignment is stupid."). Once again tutors must respect students’ perceptions, but they should also try to shift the focus from the things that students blame for their problems to possible actions that students might take to effect positive change, such as getting a clearer idea of the assignment from a teacher. When students recognize their problems, tutors can suggest observational tasks. These tasks should focus on positives, on exceptions to the problems that normally exist (e.g., "During this week try to identify a time when the problem is better or worse than it is now").

Eventually, any student can move into the category of "Customer"–those people who realize that they need to help in both identifying their problems and constructing solutions. They have often given thought to what they need to work on before coming to a session, they participate in the work of the session, and they can be given behavioral tasks (e.g., to practice strategies to achieve the goals the student has defined).

The Model at Work in the Writing Center. The two transcripts here demonstrate our attempts to use solution-building techniques. The student in the first example came to the writing center dripping visual and verbal signs that she was not happy about being there; she seemed both angry and defeated.

Joel (the tutor): What would you like to work on today?

Karen: I’m just a bad writer.

Joel (echoing Karen): "You’re just a bad writer?"

Karen: Well, yeah, like the organization--I just don’t know how to organize it.

Joel (echoing): You "don’t know how to organize it?"

Karen: Yeah, I just kinda threw all my stuff into it--I didn’t put it into any kind of order.

Instead of reading the paper and telling Karen that she needed to work on organization, Joel let Karen direct the agenda for the session. Instead of challenging Karen’s perceptions of her poor writing skills, Joel’s echoes led her to explain what evidence she had for believing she was a poor writer. That made her focus on organization. She could then work with Joel to identify what she called "any kind of order," which in turn led to her thinking about options for reordering.

This next session also started with signs of ill-will, directed toward the student’s teacher, who had commented on a draft and assigned a visit to the writing center as penance; the student made it clear that he thought the session would be a waste of his time.

Becky (the tutor): Ok, what exactly would you like to work on today?

Tom: Well, I don’t know.

Becky: Well, do you have an assignment with you?

Tom: No, but we basically had to write a research paper about education at the college level.

Becky: So what did you write about?

Tom: Teacher motivation.

Becky: Well, your professor commented here that you needed more paragraph development; do you know what she means?

Student: No.

Becky: What do you think she might mean?

Tom: I don’t know–maybe to make my paragraphs longer?

Becky: How might you make the paragraphs longer?

Tom: I don’t know–maybe by giving more examples.

Becky: That’s a good idea. Let’s see what we can do with this paragraph.

(After several minutes of generating ideas for examples, Tom changed the subject.)

Tom: Maybe we could work on the other comment my teacher had about making the paper more lively.

Becky: Ok, how do you think you could make the paper more lively?

Tom: I don’t know.

Becky: Well, when is the paper due?

Tom: Tomorrow at noon.

Becky: Well, if you woke up tomorrow morning and a miracle had happened, making your paper more lively, what would be the first thing you saw that would tell you that your paper was more lively?

Tom: I don’t know . . . maybe more lively words.

Becky: Ok–good. Would there by anything else?

Tom: Maybe some exciting examples?

Becky: Ok, let’s work with those two ideas in your paper.

(They then worked on verb choice and concrete examples.)

The example shows how solution-building questions, including the miracle question, nudged the student to think about concrete revisions, even though the student wasn’t willing to do so at the outset.

Limitations and Possibilities. Our experiments yielded cautions as well as promises. The model’s use in writing centers seems to be limited in a number of ways:

•The process can seem too scripted, too artificial. It takes a lot of practice to make the method instinctive.

•The model seemed to be especially good for beginning sessions and for work on global matters (e.g., focus and organization), but making transitions to concrete work, on individual paragraphs, sentences, etc., could be awkward.

•The model requires patient questioning, and that takes time; while giving students room to build their own solutions, 30- or even 60-minute sessions can fly by, and students may leave with the feeling that they have not accomplished much.

•The method raises the stakes for students; they quickly see that their answers indicate the need for major revisions, and they may unexpectedly retreat. One student began a session with a clearly cooperative spirit, but five minutes later realized, as the tutor later said, that "he needed to have a point"; he refused to answer the tutor’s next question and instead said, "Please just read my paper."

•We wonder if students will come back to the writing center if we typically give them long-term rather than immediate help. Solution-building makes them work to teach themselves lessons that will improve their writing, but they may not leave a session with a polished paper. A recent cartoon in the New Yorker pictures a lifeguard passively sitting on his perch reading a book while a person is drowning; people on the beach look at the lifeguard as if to ask why he’s doing nothing. His response: "We’re encouraging people to become involved in their own rescue." Sometimes our students may feel that they are sinking while we are asking miracle questions.

•The most serious difference between the model’s use in social work and in writing-center work is that writing center staffers cannot always adopt a "not knowing" posture. Often we do know more than the students we help. In one session a tutor spent ten minutes trying to encourage a student to understand why he might choose active rather than passive voice before realizing that the student had no idea what active or passive voice is. We in writing centers have so sanctified the concept of ownership that we sometimes forget to ask what our students actually own. They do not own their grammar and punctuation rules, disciplinary traditions, or teacher’s requirements; and if we possess such knowledge, we are responsible for sharing it.

Despite the limitations of the model we have been pleased with its results, and we will continue to use Berg and DeJong’s book in our training. We began our study of the social-work model assuming that it would help us with difficult types of students–"visitors" and "complainants." As it turned out, however, we learned the model’s usefulness for all students, and our most serious students were especially positive in their responses. Furthermore, our most skeptical tutors–those who thought the model oozed too much touchy-feely psycho-babble–became the model’s strongest advocates. As they became more comfortable using the model, they realized that it made them more flexible, less scripted, and more likely to listen carefully and work with individuals.

It is possible that the model was more successful at encouraging collaborative work than former training methods simply because we developed it in collaboration--our entire staff owned this entire project. But we do not believe that is the case; we believe that the model offers a harmony of principles and practices that enriches our training and practice.

Note: We thank the staff of our Rhetoric Center for their contributions to this paper: Coray Ames, Matt Forsythe, Rodney Haveman, Joe Moore, Joel Schickel, and Becky Watkins.