Training Peer Writing Tutors

The UCWbL hires between 35-55 new peer writing tutors each year and maintains a staff of about 80-90 peer writing tutors, all of whom engage in initial and ongoing training and professional development. We design our professional development opportunities to promote collaboration and reflection, to build and advance knowledge, to increase awareness of and appreciation for diversity, and to provide a space where we can motivate and support one another as peer writing tutors.

How to UCWbL: The Handbook

In an effort to be transparent about our belief, values, practices, policies, and procedures, we provide each staff member with a copy of our staff handbook, How to UCWbL.

Writing Group Appointments

Download a .pdf (5MB)

The UCWbL maintains a list of "core readings" that all staff members read as part of their training course and that shape our day-to-day work with writers and instructors.

Andrea Lunsford. "Collaboration, Control, and the Idea of a Writing Center."

Bradley Hughes, Paula Gillespie, and Harvey Kail. "What They Take with Them: Findings from the Peer Writing Tutor Alumni Research Project."

Charles Bazerman. "Speech Acts, Genres, and Activity Systems: How Texts Organize Activity and People."

John C. Bean. "Writing Comments on Students Papers."

John Nordlof. "Vygotsky, Scaffolding, and the Role of Theory in Writing Center Work."

Joseph Williams. "Understanding Style" & "Correctness."

Linda K. Shamoon and Deborah H. Burns. "A Critique of Pure Tutoring."

Linda S. Flower and John R. Hayes. "Problem-Solving Strategies and the Writing Process."

Muriel Harris and Tony Silva. "Tutoring ESL Students: Issues and Options."

Nancy Sommers. "Responding to Student Writing."

Stephen North. "The Idea of a Writing Center."

Tom Truesdell. "Not Choosing Sides: Using Directive and Non-Directive Methodology in a Writing Session."

WRD 395 & WRD 582

Training begins for all UCWbL peer writing tutors in either WRD 395 or WRD 582, the undergraduate and graduate sections, respectively, of the Writing Center Theory and Pedagogy course.

Recent Course Syllabi

WRD395 Section One WRD395 Section Two WRD395 Section Two