In the Writing Center, we seek to foster a growth mindset—the belief that we can enhance our skills through hard work, reflection, and collaboration—with our writers and with ourselves. We know from experience how helpful—and necessary—feedback on our work is in order to affirm our strengths, receive guidance on ways to improve, and connect our practices with our beliefs and values.
Completing a goal you define each quarter and reflecting on your work gives you time and space to develop insights into your own work and note areas of strength and areas where you’d like to learn more. Reflection is also an important part of developing metacognition: the ability to notice not only what you are doing in your tutoring practice, but why you are making particular choices. Taking time to regularly reflect can help you to identify the strategies, values, and assumptions shaping your work and to name the writing center pedagogy you are already practicing. This awareness supports your growth as a tutor and is highly transferable to other academic and professional contexts.
The tool you’ll use to prepare for your quarterly check-in—an ePortfolio—allows you and the administrators at the Writing Center to have concrete, tangible documentation of your work quarter-by-quarter while you work for us. As such, it helps administrators write specific letters of recommendation about you and provide detailed references for you after you successfully complete your employment at the Writing Center.
For each quarter you work for us, you will check in with an assigned administrator to discuss your ongoing professional development as a tutor and employee.
Administrator Assignments 2026-27
In advance of your check-in meeting with your assigned administrator, for each quarter you work for us—with the exception of your final quarter—you will prepare the items listed below in an ePortfolio based on a template we provide. You are strongly encouraged to proactively block off up to 1 hour per week (Weeks 2-8) in WCOnline to complete the requirements.
To support your individual and collective growth as tutors, you will set and work toward a SMART goal each quarter.
To help you take stock of your work as a Peer Writing Tutor by identifying the practices shaping your tutoring and noting opportunities for growth, we ask you to reflect each quarter on your appointments.
Reflection is more than looking back at whether an appointment went “well.” Writing studies scholar Kara Taczak (2015) describes reflection as a deliberate practice that helps us recognize what we are doing and consider why we make particular choices. Over time, this metacognitive awareness helps us “recall, reframe, and relocate” knowledge and practices across different contexts (p. 79). Because reflection is a skill that must itself be practiced, returning to it each quarter gives you repeated opportunities to notice how your tutoring is developing.
Your tutoring practices may become intuitive over time, so reflection offers us the opportunity to make the implicit explicit. This means slowing down to think through your choices and identify the pedagogy behind them. Asking a question, changing strategies, prioritizing one concern over another, or responding to a writer’s stated goals can reflect larger commitments to writer agency, collaboration, accessibility, responsiveness, or transfer.
<aside> 👁️
Reflection helps make internalized knowledge visible: instead of only asking What did I do?, we can also ask Why did I make that choice? What tutoring value was I practicing? What might I carry into another appointment?
For an example of this process, visit the Writing Center’s blog UCWbLing to read “Wait, That Was Pedagogy?: Metacognitive Reflection & the Choices We Make as Tutors” by Cailey Scott.
</aside>