Coordinated Consultation Information for Faculty

Coordinated Consultations are a collaboration between Miami faculty and the HWC. Faculty request that we set aside a number of appointments, within a given time frame, for their students to come in for appointments with peer consultants. Faculty also agree to work with HWC staff to ensure that students asked to make consultation appointments understand the nature and purpose of these consultations.

Research shows that these types of visits function best when faculty/instructors are involved in planning the appointments. As such, faculty and instructors requesting Coordinated Consultations must let us know the following: 

1. How many students are in the class and will be asked to attend consultations
2. The assignment students are working on (including assignment sheets, rubrics, and other supporting documents, if you have them)
3. The time frame students have for writing and revising
4. The instructional goals for students’ appointments with HWC peer consultants. 

This information will be provided by faculty/instructors in our request formstack. Once the HWC staff has received the request, they will work directly with the faculty to: 

• Determine which type of consultation will work best for students (see below), given the number of students we will accommodate, the assignment, and the timeframe for writing and revising.
• Schedule a brief class visit to introduce students to Coordinated Consultations, where they will help students make appointments and prepare them for their work with peer consultants. 
• Set aside an appropriate number of consultations for students.

The number of students, the assignment being worked on, and the timeframe for writing and revising will all determine which type of consultation will work best for different Coordinated Consultation schedules.

Some options may include:

• Full hour or half-hour consultations (half-hour consultations are available only at our site in Farmer, the Howe Center for Business Writing),
• In-person or Live Online (synchronous online) consultations, 
• Individual or paired consultations (in a paired consultation, students come with a classmate to discuss their drafts together with a consultant; this works best with assignments that benefit from a classmate’s perspective).

If faculty have other ideas for making Coordinated Consultations work well for their students, they are encouraged to let us know when they make their request.

Class visits help HWC staff prepare faculty and their students for HWC consultations. Without a class visit and the information and resources it provides, students may not understand the purpose of their HWC consultations, and, as a result, their appointments may be less effective. 

HWC staff will work with faculty to design a class visit presentation specifically tailored to the faculty member’s intentions for these peer consultations.

The HWC recommends that faculty/instructors spend time outside the required class visit to discuss their goals with their students for upcoming consultations. Research shows that students who lack knowledge of their faculty/instructors’ intentions/goals for their visit often struggle to understand the purpose and effectiveness of their appointments. As a result, students sometimes come to their appointments with little to no understanding of what a writing center appointment is or what its benefits are, and may be reluctant to participate fully. 

To prevent this confusion, consider implementing credit-bearing, short pre- and post-session reflections on their appointments as outlined below:  

Before your students are scheduled for their writing appointments

Prepare them by providing a short pre-session reflection prompt that they must submit before their appointment (around 300-350 words).

Questions they might answer in their reflection include:

• What characteristics in a writing consultant might best support your assigned writing task, i.e., would you feel better supported if you scheduled with a consultant who is in the same year as you, a consultant in the same program as you, a consultant who shares the same interests as you, or a consultant who has no connection to the topic you are writing about?
• What points of concern regarding your writing task or draft do you have right now you’d like to discuss with your writing consultant, i.e., concerns with idea generation, research, organization, syntax issues, assignment expectations, instructor/peer feedback, genre conventions, etc.?
• What should you do to prepare for your appointment so it is as effective as possible for your writing process?

After your students have completed their writing center appointment

Prepare a post-session reflection prompt to help them process the session, and also curate a revision/drafting plan based on the outcome of that appointment (350-400 words).

Questions they might answer in their reflection include:

• When was your session, who was your consultant, and what was its modality? Why did you choose each?
• In your opinion, what was the most difficult/challenging aspect of the session? 
• Was this opportunity helpful to you as a writer, student, or individual? Why or why not? 
• What advice from this session do you want to implement in your writing process for this assignment or even the final draft?
• What advice do you plan not to implement? 
• What would you do differently if you had to go to another appointment for this course? What worked well that you’d do again?
• What, if anything, did you learn about yourself as a writer, student, or person during this appointment?

At the end of all HWC consultations, students receive an email from our online scheduling platform that briefly summarizes what was discussed in their session. Faculty can ask students to forward them this email as evidence of their visit.

But in addition to forwarding you this email, we also recommend that you require students to compose a brief reflection on how their consultation has shaped their revising plans. Research shows that this kind of reflection significantly impacts students’ development and sense of self-efficacy as both writers and learners. In this reflection, you might ask students to consider:

1. What feedback do you plan to use as you continue to write and revise this draft?
2. What feedback do you plan not to use, and why? 
3. What questions about the assignment, if any, did this consultation raise for you?
4. What did you learn about yourself as a writer, student, or person during this appointment?
5. What might you do differently or similarly if you were to make another writing center appointment?