be open the writing live in our high school it's unique in that we don't have a physical space but we do have places where students may meet with the peer tutors either in the library or in my room room one forty one mean writing is everything not just in english you can bring in papers from your social studies classes and pretty much anything that involves the discipline of writing so we just help you revise in further develop your topics  the information where do i get the information i have i heard there was some though some would say i went online but just for a general how do i get the information like about why what we do have a web page and for any further information you can go to  what was the biggest challenge you have experience being a peer you very just from a a larger standpoint i would say the hardest part is just getting a start and getting the recognition not about getting people to come to the writing  lab but i would say specifically as per value we're just getting back into the zone of cover to get people who may not be the best writers and really go in and getting them to that place because you can't help everyone become a stellar writer but it is nice to see an were choice is another big thing and i'd say maybe transitions as well but yeah pretty good of our own and some of my favorite conversations as i oversee the conferences i'm present for most of the conferences between the student writer and the student evaluator some of my favorite conversations have taken place simply about ideas students feel free to come to the writing lab to start their writing process to talk about ideas talk about organizing the ideas and that often has that that's been very rewarding to begin the process and then of course once the draft is written then of course we can kick in and help in other ways but i really like the conversation about ideas so if students are writing their college essays or working on scholarship applications sometimes just having a conversation to get started is very helpful  have experience from it actually we have making i've done some research and we took a poll on our previous writing approaches the middle school and we wrote a paper and we submitted it recently to the peer review which is a big international journal and we're trying to get it published so the premise of the article was how did you feel after being a peer valued her coach in the middle school and we got just a unanimous increasing confidence better writing skills and things  and we have monthly meetings just to talk about the experiences that we've had and to plan for the future we have conference with over one hundred students so far this year and it's just been an amazing experience as we've gotten it up and running we really want the writing lab to be become part of the p t high school culture we want students to know that we're there and we would just really like to see that the concept of the writing lab pain the challenge is what you have never knew that you have experience i mean with every conference you learn something new whether it be about a topic that they're writing about about the person you just learn every every conference like recently there is a project her honors english ten on mouse which was a story about nazi germany tell from the point of view of animals i mean that was something i have never had any experience with and it was so cool to see their individual interpretations and i was starting to learn more with each conference about the overall topic of the book and i was starting to see connections so it's very interesting to see how you learn from them in their project  i would say we offer everything writing related i mean if you just want to come in there i love for a quiet space just to get started without a distractions it's a great place for that if you want to conference with someone and hash out some ideas were open to that too if you want someone to edit your paper we can do that or go over your final papers i mean we can really anything writing related we're open to do and willing to do and really it's all levels of writing it's not just if you're consider yourself a bad writer i mean you're not a bad writer you just have to put yourself underwriting lab and i think that's being organized to help with the college application process and room one forty one and we also have we were also offering after hours or  before school and after school by appointment if students visit the website they can sign up for a conference either before or after school i'm just curious you said you say  how does a house or how well that's something we could have a conversation and help that student generate ideas we could then help them organize those ideas we could then help them draft and then once that draft is near completed we could give them some feedback about revision and just from start to finish where they are and specifically about the cause uppercase such as i went through this process this year and the most important part is just getting some ideas onto a page  because even if they're not the best ideas as long as you get started in your thinking about your topic you're still going to be on a path to success but it's important just get those ideas on the page at first  can just help them get thinking of because i mean a lot of us have gone through a similar process or just writing papers so we know how difficult it is by i think it's important just to talk with someone and because that gets you thinking and what they say back to you also gets them thinking and so i think just talking another person deftly gets the process going but yes mrs gregory mentioned many times before just come to us just to have that ideological conversation and that really helps from start the writing process  that i think our main goals are to get the students wanting to come and noticing that this is an important resource some the reason that i wanted to establish this club was because we had that gap between middle school and college so we had it in middle school and that's a great resource for a township and any university that you go she's going to have a writing center of some sort so being having that exposure in high school really helps you prepare for college so was  you if you're i'm expanding on your ideas where we're also collecting and we're also collecting kind of a collection of resources to provide to students with some handouts just to enrich some things that they have learned along the way we can also help them with resources where they can look to for guidance like purdue owl and some other resources and things like that that they haven't might not have explored in an loud we have we have lists of marker verbs of transitions that we can give to the student for them to keep and use on future assignments and just some materials like that to enrich what they've learned  say how do you what do you guys do when you when you have a meeting of people there you know i mean this is a time where all of us can come together and share experiences we've had that month maybe some more advertising ideas because we really want the students to come out and have exposure to the writing and it's nice to just touch base with each other about our experience of people we've had because sometimes you'll be talking to someone about a certain person you'll see that they're coming back and they're returning customer learn what we want them to improve when they're right in kind of prepare them for college i would say i would say that is the number one purpose other i love to get them ready to continue on that next step and that's another big reason why we started the writing l any grade level and it oftentimes helped because i think an underclassman student is going to better connect with underclassman clients so we do like a variety and then that the sustainability of the program is really dependent on those younger students so by the time they're finished the experience they may have had four years of experience as a writing peer evaluator and what a wonderful thing that that is to them when they're applying to colleges they can say that they were certainly come in they should introduce themselves to to me again in around one forty one and just you know let us know their name and then the interest will then be you know will be aware of their interests and they can join us it's really a pretty in the end they also need to have a spot in their schedule they need to have an open period or are you willing to work during their lunch they need that open period because it is a club that operates during the school day  well i think you know with the with those experiences just the enrichment that we can provide them outside of their class when it doesn't count for points it's just a comfortable environment for them to maybe think of ideas to slow the pace of the process a little bit for that particular student and for four again it's the conversation about ideas that so important staring at a blank page is not fun  once you have a conversation about the ideas and you do that all important step three writing then then the writing flows from there so i think with students who struggle in to write or students who are coming in to us as an e s l or a second language we can just really help with the conversation aspect and help them slow down the process so that they can generate ideas  it so useful for students to think oh i want to go there i want to go there i want to hold my writing and get ready for college was a lesson which would make it why is that why it's so important for this school a lot of schools around our area do not have this resource and i really believe that students should use this resource as much as they can because other schools do not offer it making i recently went to a conference in washington d c to present our ideas in how our writing lab functions and we saw a neuro presented  speak volumes and maybe in later years will start to take a very active approach of really advertising this approach so how it how you guys advertise very loudly how you advertise  right now just flyers word of mouth on the website i think that when we are in the library that's a central location where students are there for other reasons but they see maybe a peer they see they see a peer coaching session going on and think hey that might really help me again if the student it's generating the ideas if you can think of ideas you can write and then we can we can help help you put all that together  we were just up and running this year september and october so unfortunately i think we missed the wave of college essay is this fear but next year we will be there day one and we will be ready to see students to read drafts of college essays and i do anticipate that we will have a lot a lot of traffic in the fall and most college applications are due around december the first that's a that's a big wave right there so we'll be we'll be there to help with ideas and to read drafts it's just again another another set of eyes to to draft like there's a common application essays are probably going to be open this summer so we encourage all you know all students who are beginning the process to start writing drafts of essays over the summer and access through not beyond those those questions that are asked through the common apps process are usually just like very generic questions about what challenges has that student over how do they think they can contribute to that university why do they want to attend that university and really much of the college application process once you've written a couple essays you can then revise them to really address other prompts as improve on i would say getting word out i think that is of the biggest problem we face right now is just getting the word out and getting everything started but what we've seen at the middle school is i was i was the first year at the middle school and what happened was i fully anticipate that's what's going to happen here when i was here to see it but i know that it's going to get to that point so for the last question for this show i just want