Megan's two sessions on Wednesday consisted of a one hour appointment and a half hour appointment. When I walked in at four she had already begun. It was a google hangout session with a grad student who had written a 6 page paper about servant leadership. He made it clear that his goal for the session was to condense the paper so that he could get everything across within the max page limit. Megan was able to highlight and change things on the paper in real time so the student could see it from his computer. However, during the session she didn't make any big changes herself, only highlighted passages and added her notes on the side.

Megan read through the paper herself, quickly so that they could get through all of it. As she did, it was obvious that his main problems were sentence fragmentation and lack of clarity. Megan recognized immediately that the best way for him to condense the paper would be to eliminate passages where he repeated himself, and highlighted problem areas. Often, as soon as she would read through passages the student was able to point out his own mistakes. One example of an adjustment to match the discourse of the paper was an edit to the sentence "Servant leadership develops employees..." The student agreed that it sounded like employees were being literally molded and that the diction choice didn't match the formality that the paper required. The student was able to point out another informal sentence, which began with "Another interesting fact about leadership..." that sounded like he was selling servant leadership instead of providing an analysis.

Megan offered encouragement by telling him that the paper was strong, he was just too caught up on how to say what he was thinking. This was obviously a subject that he was passionate about but as  Nurse, he was taught to write concisely and with fragments. Megan suggested that he use a dictation program to make his writing truer to his thought process, something I don't think I would have thought of myself. The next appointment was her regular ESL student who she works with to help improve pronunciations by having him read through news articles.

What stood out the most to me was Megan's ability to take authority while ultimately allowing the students to make decisions themselves. They put a lot of trust in her because she knew exactly what to do, so she had their attention from the start. But she was not condescending in the slightest, only helpful and supportive.