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Dr Richard Baker : Teaching : Papers on Teaching : "Super-tutorials" - A method to assist small group teaching
'Super-Tutorials', a method to assist small group teachingRichard Baker Fenner School of Environment and Society Australian National University (ANU)
IntroductionTutorials are a standard part of university teaching in arts and humanities faculties in Australia. Classes are subdivided into smaller tutorial groups that typically consists of between 10 and 15 students. Tutorials meet weekly to discuss predetermined topics. They run in parallel to lectures providing students with the opportunity to discuss with each other issues raised in lectures. Usually, at the first meeting of the tutorial group, students pick their tutorial topic and are then required to write a tutorial paper (that is handed in and assessed) on this topic. The paper is often read to the tutorial and discussion is then meant to occur. Typically the tutorials are run by a tutor whose role is to facilitate this discussion. Tutors in the past have tended to be postgraduate students based in the department. However with decreasing funds being available for such part time teaching more lecturers are now running the tutorials for their courses. As an undergraduate student at the ANU in the late 1970s I took part in tutorials in a number of departments. While having value as a forum for student to student exchange of ideas, the tutorials rarely lived up to their potential. Apart from the student 'giving the tut' the rest of the class tended to do as little preparation as they could. Tutorials tended to be punctuated by embarrassing silences while a desperate tutor attempted to get unwilling students to speak. The tutors were often forced to revert to monologues that were essentially no different from lectures. We all dutifully attended such non-functional tutorials as a result of either formal requirements to do so (it could be a requirement to attend the tutorials to pass the course) or due to incentives (such as 10% of the course mark being on tutorial attendance and participation). Fortunately for my studies there was an exception to this pattern. Wilfred Shawcross, an innovative archaeologist frustrated with the kinds of tutorials described above, devised a series of exercises that provided simulations of prehistoric excavations. The crucial point that made these exercises work was that each student was required to do some pre-tutorial preparation answering particular questions and that bringing this work to the tutorials allowed students to contribute more constructively to the tutorials. BackgroundPartly inspired by this good example I was determined when I was appointed to teach in the ANU Geography Department to try and make tutorials in my courses work better than they did for me. Before describing some of my methods for achieving this I need to say a bit about the course and the range of students doing the unit. The Environmental Policy and Planning unit aims to give students an understanding of the Australian public policy process and the nature of Australian environmental policy and planning. Particular attention is given to:
The course has 13 weeks of lectures. A number of guest lecturer give talks. Being based in the national capital it is possible to have guest speakers from relevant government departments, key national research organisations and from various environmental NGOs. The guest speakers often give dramatically different perspectives on the same issue. In the first year I soon realised that such contrasts provided a challenge for students, in particular for science students who tended to expect that they were going to be told the 'right' answer on a issue. The Geography Program is a member of both the Arts and the Science faculties and my unit has attracted about equal numbers of science and arts students. Partly in response to questions on 'what is the right answer ' I encouraged students in tutorials to learn to listen to each other and to realise how diverse views on environmental issues are. Putting Supertutorials in placeIn the first year of teaching the unit the process of sitting each week through five tutorial classes on the same topic made me realise that there would be advantages in getting together the students from each tutorial group who were facilitating individual tutorial topics. An obvious advantage would be that these students who had done much more work on the topic than other members of the tutorial could get together with other equally prepared students to share ideas. At the end of the first year of the course I carried out an evaluation of my teaching. I gave the students the opportunity in their final tutorial to provide anonymous feedback on a number of issues. The students gave enthusiastic support to the embryonic idea that I put to them of 'supertutorials' (as I coined them). In 1995 I put the supertutorials into place. They are pre-tutorial workshops attended by the tutorial facilitators for that particular topic. At the 'supertutorial' the students decide how the tutorial question is going to be handled in the forthcoming tutorials. (See figure one for an outline of the logistics of how the 'supertutorials' work). In the first tutorial students pick the issue that they wish to facilitate from a list that I provide of very broad tutorial topics. The unit is structured so that the tutorial topics for discussion each week fit in with the lecture topics for that week. In the first tutorial I also outline how the 'supertutorials' will work and give great emphasis to the need to establish a cooperative learning environment where students learn from each other. Having picked their tutorial topics I explain that this means that they know what 'supertutorial' they need to attend. The 'supertutorial' being held the week before their tutorial topic is discussed. As there were five tutorial groups each week and usually two facilitators in each tutorial class the supertutorials have usually involved about 10 students.
Figure 1: The Maths of Super Tutorials
Figure 2: The supertutorial -tutorial cycle Another logistical issue to note is that the first 'supertutorial' can not be held until the week after the students have picked their topics. The first 'supertutorial' is therefore held in the second week of the course and the first tutorial that is facilitated by students returning from 'supertutorials' therefore can not be until week three of the course. The first two weeks of tutorials therefore operate as conventional tutorials without any 'supertutorial' input. In these first two tutorials I spend a considerable amount of time talking to the students about methods to facilitate tutorials. One particularly constructive way to do this has been to stop the class on occasions and to encourage students to reflect on what we have been doing. For example, I might draw their attention to the fact that I have used techniques such as: 1) brainstorming to quickly draw out ideas, 2) splitting the class into sub-groups for short periods to work on particular tasks, 3) appoint scribes to summarise key issues and 4) used overheads to ask questions and structure discussion. One overhead that I show in these early tutorials outlines that when students come to the 'supertutorial' they need to bring a one page summary outlining what they think are:
The 'supertutorials' are brainstorming sessions in which each participant gets to say what they think are the key issues for the topic and how best we might get the class to deal with them the following week. In the first year I ran them I got the class to keep discussing the issue until a consensus developed on how the tutorials should be run. One interesting outcome of the 'supertutorials' has been the amazement often expressed that we manage in the two hours available to come to an agreement on how we would deal with the issue. Students often also became very conscious of the real world parallels of our 'supertutorial' sessions since many of the topics discussed in the 'supertutorials' centre around how diverse views on the environment can be dealt with and how agreement might be reached between such diverse views. In response to student feedback at the end of the first year of supertutorials in subsequent years there has been no requirement for the supertutorials to agree on how the topic was to be handled in the forthcoming tutorials. This gave each team of tutorial facilitators the option to listen to everyone's ideas on how they planned to run the tutorials and to borrow any suggestions they wanted to from anyone else in the class. This system of individual choice has worked well and increased the student sense of ownership of how the tutorials are to be run. By the end of the two hour 'supertutorial' the participants are required to have a very clear idea on how the following weeks tutorials are going to be run and are encouraged to come and see me during the week if they want any further assistance in their preparation for facilitating the tutorials. The 'supertutorials' have always been held on a Monday or Tuesday and all the tutorials on Tuesday or later in the week to allow 'supertutorial' participants to report back to their tutorial class one week before they facilitate the tutorial. At the tutorial they tell their class mates what is going to happen in the class in a weeks time and in particular what they want their class mates to read, view or listen to and what kind of preparation they need to do before the tutorial.
Throughout the course I use a variety of methods to stress the importance of the tutorials in the course. For example, at the beginning of the course I stress that the tutorials are the forum for the most in depth learning in the unit. I also argue that the tutorials provide the opportunity for them to develop some of the oral skills that they are going to need to get a job (i.e. performing in job interviews) and to function once they are in the work place. I try to always have more than one person facilitating each tutorial and get them to work together in preparing for the class. This requires them to work closely with someone else and enhance their skills in collaborating with peers. Students have a say in what the final assessment will be in the course and in introducing the issue of assessment I stress that the assessment should reflect the importance of the tutorials. In each year the course has been taught a large proportion of the mark has been based on tutorial papers and all exam questions are based on tutorial topics. One task for each weeks tutorial facilitators is to draft possible exam questions. The dozen or so possible exam questions for each tutorial topic are made available to the whole class and I select one question from each topic for the final exam Throughout the course I stress the importance of the tutorials as a forum to share ideas and I go to great lengths to try and encourage students to learn from each other. I try to overcome the competitive culture of universities in part by joking with them about how they have to borrow each others good ideas. I also aim to avoid having people in tutorials simply read out a tutorial paper when discussing a topic. To make sure that the tutorial is seen as a learning experience and not an ends in itself tutorial papers are required to be submitted two weeks after chosen topic is discussed and it is made clear to students that they are expected to include ideas learnt from others in the tutorial. One particularly significant outcome of the 'supertutorial' method is that it is not tutor telling the class how to deal with the topic but class members making these decisions themselves. Moreover, having decided what the key issues for the topic are and how they wish the class to consider these issues it is the student facilitators who go into the tutorials to tell their class mates what to read for the next tutorial. It is interesting to note that the class has often set considerably more reading than I would have ever attempted to set. A crucial factor in making the 'supertutorials' and subsequent tutorials work is a requirement that students attending them must come to the class with a completed one page summary. In the case of the 'supertutorial' this involves a summary of what the student considers are the key issues on the topic and their ideas on how the tutorial might go about exploring this issue. In the case of the tutorial members, the task to be addressed in their one page summaries are set by the tutorial facilitators who, fresh from a supertutorial, report back on what they want the class to read and think about for the next week's tutorials. Facilitators are encouraged to set tasks that will facilitate lively and constructive debate in the tutorial. Evaluation of 'supertutorials'At the end of the first year of 'supertutorials' I organised a formal review of their effectiveness by having Dr Malcolm Pettigrove from the ANU's professional education development section, the Centre for Education Development and Academic Methods (CEDAM) attended the last supertutorial and each of the last week's tutorials that flowed out of this 'supertutorial' . Confidentially and in my absence Dr Pettigrove organised focus group discussions on the value of the supertutorials. His conclusions included the statement that:
My 1996 and 1997 Environmental Policy and Planning classes have also completed anonymous surveys administered by the Centre for Education Development and Academic Methods. Figure 3 illustrates the classes responses on a standardized 1-7 scale to the question "What contribution have the 'supertutorials' made to this course".
Figure 3: What contribution did super tutes make to the course? ConclusionThe "supertutorial" idea has been used (and adapted) in courses in:
The only thing in common has been the idea of pre-tutorial preparation workshops to assist student subsequently facilitate tutorials. The "supertutorial" idea is not a formulae that can be applied but a set of ideas that need to be adapted to particular teaching and learning settings. I encourage anyone interested to experiment with 'supertutorials' to do so and let me know how they work for you. AcknowledgmentsI wish to thank all the students in the 1994-2007 Environmental Policy and Planning units for their feedback on 'supertutorials' and Malcolm Pettigrove for his considerable assistance. NB an earlier version of this paper was given to the International Geography Congress held in The Hague in August 1996 and was published in the Proceedings of the Commission on Geographical Education that is part of this conference Comments and feedback most welcome Document detailsTitle: 'SUPERTUTORIALS', a method to assist small group teaching Last modified: 7/02/08 Author: Richard Baker |
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