Classroom Visits

The Writing Center offers 15-minute visits to your classroom.  In this brief overview, a Writing Center consultant will describe our services--including one-to-one tutoring, workshops, eTutoring, and walk-in hours--and help students determine how they can make the best use of the Writing Center's services.  We will also address practical concerns: how to use our online scheduling system, make appointments, and access student session records.  If you wish to schedule a classroom visit, please download our Classroom Visit Request Form and email it to writingcenter@baruch.cuny.edu.

Workshops

This year, the Writing Center offers 12 workshops in four skill clusters, taught by a team of 5 consultants, offered three times a week (Mondays, Tuesdays, and Fridays from 1-2pm in the Feit Seminar room).  Please click here for a complete workshop schedule, and for instructions on how students can sign up.   This semester, we would like to make available all lesson plans, materials, and readings that the Writing Center has developed for this extensive set of workshop offerings, for use in the classroom.  Please click here to view and download materials from Writing Center workshops.

Requiring Students to Visit the Writing Center

While we understand and appreciate the rationale behind requiring an entire class to attend the Writing Center, there are a few issues that make this potentially (and historically) problematic. One is that we only offer about 140 appointments a week--a number determined by budget limitations--so an entire class can easily take up a large portion of our appointments in any given week. These appointment availabilty restrictions also mean that, often, students required to attend have a difficult time trying to find an appointment, which brings extra frustration and anxiety to the writing process. Additionally, students who are required to go the Writing Center often come without the investment in the session that's really necessary to be productive, since our pedagogy is student-centered and requires their actively working and participating throughout for the session. Students who come with the primary goal of getting someone to sign a piece of paper certifying they've been here tend to get a lot less out of a consultation.

What we can very easily do, however, is gear a class visit to the specific ways that the Writing Center can aid your particular students on the specific assignments you're giving them, and strongly encourage them to visit. If you'd like to send a copy of your assignment(s) along, the consultant assigned to visit your class can develop customized talking points to explain what steps the students might need to take in the writing process, what workshops might be most useful to them, and where in the process and how the Writing Center might be of most assistance. And if there are particular students that you'd like to encourage to come our way, please do so (with as much of an "I'd like to help you develop your writing so you can excel in this class" and as little of "You are a terrible writer; go to the Writing Center" rhetoric as possible).

We understand, truly, the writing challenges your students are facing in the classroom and your desire to make sure that all of your students are challenged and getting additional writing support. If you decide ultimately to require your students to attend, we'll do our very best to work with them, but just won't be able to make any special accommodations to guarantee them appointments.