I just realized that with all of the homecoming festivities, I forgot to blog about my shadowing experience on Thursday. However, the forgetfulness on my part is not at all a reflection of my shadowing session, because it was really great.
First, my consultant and I were actually on the same page, so she was in the Writing Center at the proper time, and, thankfully for me, she had an appointment at that hour. What made it better was that I knew the student she was consulting as well, so she was very comfortable with me observing--so much so that she unhesitatingly included me in the consultation by allowing me to read over the prompt and article used after the consultant had finished reading them.
There were lots of things that went well in the session; however, a couple of things my consultant did seemed to be in direct conflict with some of the points we have learned in class. The first was that she took a few minutes to read over the student's paper (for the first time, it seemed), and she read it silently. The other thing that really sent up a red flag was that my consultant was pretty familiar with some of the texts, so she included her opinion about the content much more frequently than I thought she would. I understand that as consultants we want to target global corrections, but some of the comments the consultant made were entirely reflective of her own opinion, perspective, and interpretation of the material.
Of course, nobody is perfect, and consultants are in that number. I look forward to observing other consultations to see if my consultant's nature with this student is a consistent thing, or if it was just a simple slip into dialogue and expression with a friend (which the two were).
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