So I bragged a bit (at my own place) about my students’ response to my tutoring, and in discussion, Hugh asked for the secrets of my success, which I duly gave, including this piece of advice:
I make a big effort to learn all my students’ names, and use them.
But George said, “How?!”
Here I reveal my best technique for learning students’ names – the seating chart.
In the first tutorial, I get my students to give me their full name, and tell me a little bit about why they are doing the course. I try to make comment back to each person, using their name (basic memory technique). But more importantly, as we go around the table, I write down each person’s name around my cunning seating chart.
For the rest of that session, I work on remembering names, keeping the chart in front of me as an aid. I also tell them exactly what I’m doing. Next week, as people come in and sit down, I try to recall their names, and use them, and ask them to correct me if necessary, and I write up a fresh chart as I go. Alas, the students don’t sit in exactly the same place each week, though as it turns out, most students tend to sit in more-or-less the same area each week, or at the very least, on the same side of the table in relation to the windows or door or whatever. It’s as though they find a comfortable spot, and then stay there.
I find that I usually have to do the chart for about four weeks or so. By then, with a bit of effort, I have most of their names in memory. It’s worth doing – most students seem to really appreciate being more than just another number.
Any other helpful hints for tutors? Larvatus Prodeo seems to have a high proportion of academics and students among its permanent residents, and I’m hoping that they will want to share their wisdom. All suggestions will be gratefully received, from tutors or tutorees.
On your first day inside, pick out the biggest, baddest, meanest student in the exercise yard and beat the hell out of them in front of everyone else. You’re not going to last a fortnight if you don’t get your respect, and you can’t expect the screws to protect you. On the inside, the students run their own system.
Wait. Where was I? Oh yeah. Tutoring.
If you’ve got performance anxiety in front of your class, memorise by rote about three or four sentences—no more—introducing the topic for the lesson, or bringing up an interesting set of points to talk about and immediately throwing it back onto the students for discussion. It’ll make you feel more in control of yourself and it’ll establish a friendly pattern.
1) This is a version of the same point Liam just made: the student who volunteers to do the first class paper is always the student you can count on, for the rest of the semester, to come to your aid in talking when nobody else wants to, answering questions, restoring equilibrium and order, and summoning help if not providing immediate first aid if anybody, including you, passes out. This is a law of nature.
2) With remembering names: after a certain point your brain can hold only so many student names. Feel free to let go of the name of any student from three or more years back in order to make room for the new lot.
3) I remember student names by keying names to distinguishing marks in physical appearance, a low-rent version of the ‘memory palace’ technique as populised by Thomas Harris and Hannibal Lecter. This system fell down badly the year I had four ponytailed blondes of similar height and build called Jen, Jenny, Jeni and Jennifer all in the one seminar group.
4) The least memorable students are always the ones who sook the most if you don’t remember their names.
*cough*popularised*cough*
well, I guess this is a lecturer thing, but I never set tute papers as assessment. IMHO, it just means people cruise all semester bar one week, never read a damn thing otherwise. Makes for completely lousy tutes – and your tutors will be pushing shit uphill every week.
I set a list of relevant short readings, they get to pick one weekly from a list I provide big enough to interest anyone. They have to come prepared to summarise the main argument, for about 30 secs or so, and 5% of assessment is dedicated to how they performed at that. Another 5% is for attendance. The tute flows from discussion of those readings, and one or two central tute questions in the unit outline. Since Ive started running it that way , students never turn up having read nothing.
For tutors: get them to introduce another person – not themselves – in first class. Give em a few minutes to yabber with their neighbour for that purpose first. Always breaks the ice, and sets a good tone for the whole semester. Also, direct questions to the dhyer ones, and supportive replies when they say something, will nearly always draw them out of the term. The louder ones never need that help!
Ahem, ’shyer ones’, that was.
Write “Love” on your eyelids.
Where there are exercises with set answers like maths, accounting, if only for politeness, the lecturer in charge should distribute the tutorial answers to the tutors ahead of the classes. It also has the effect of providing quality control, an especially important feature when the tutors are not products of the course they are teaching.
When truly desperate crack a joke. If you sound really foul when you repeat risque jokes, trawl through the jokes in Christmas crackers, they are corny, the students will know you are daggy.
I would very much like to hear from the tutored about what they think a good tutorial is and whether they can pinpoint what the tutor might have contributed to making it happen.
Of course I have been a member of the tutored, but I was totally uncritical and liked everything, even the tutorials that were more like a psychoanalysis session with nobody saying anything, ever.
I prepare a lot of material for tutes – discussion topics, passages to read and discuss, rough material for minilectures if they might be required. I also usually go to the library at the start of the week and pick out a small clutch of tangentially related books, and bring those to class explicitly for students to browse through if they feel their minds beginning to wander (this is in 2-hour tutorials) – like when we studied Voss I brought a whole lot of explorer journals and a book of Nolan’s desert paintings. And I dump the prepared stuff if the group has something it wants to discuss.
With the whole class I try to project an aura of indifference to personalities and personal issues. One to one I don’t persist with that. Contrary to the wisdom that occasionally trickles dwon from our institution’s teaching and learning professionals, I think it’s rather a relief for most people to be a part of an interesting and vital conversation where displaying & interacting with personal baggage is not a priority. Like what TS Eliot said about genuine poetry being an escape from personality rather than an exhibition of it. It can’t be left aside for ever of course, especially perhaps in a discipline that demands critical self-awareness about reading/subject positions, but I don’t think it’s necessary to place it front and centre. This is the main reason I don’t initiate the playing of ice-breaker games – that and because many students find them puerile.
I am aware that I talk too much in tutorials and it’d be better really to let some of those silences ferment from time to time. But other than, I believe I am a very good tutor, and it’s because I put so much work into preparation. I have known tutors who didn’t actually bother to read the literary work they were tutoring. Well, students are not stupid and they do notice that kind of thing.
“keeping the chart in front of me as an aid.”
Like the protagonist in “The Lives Of Others”?
“Write “Love” on your eyelids.”
Well “love” on one and “hate” on the other.
Re remembering names, isn’t it legal if not compulsory now to just microchip the little buggers?
I always though a good way to kick off the first tute of the season would be with a quote from Charles Laughton in “Mutiny On The Bounty”
“During the recent heavy weather, I’ve had the opportunity to watch all of you at work on deck and aloft. You don’t know wood from canvas! And it seems you don’t want to learn! Well, I’ll have to give you a lesson!”
You do sound like a good tutor Laura. I can’t remember much of tutorials aside from the ‘auras’ left behind on the walls from the last lot. Our tute rooms were white painted, windowless, dungeons.
I agree with you about the freedom of enjoying conversation sans the personal, but its only a very, very, evolved personality who can leave their baggage at the door.
It was tutorials that taught me it was possible to argue for practically anything regardless. An important lesson, but one I found in the end, a bit tiresome and way too wordy. I wasn’t into the obfuscation and the wankery–(it was art school), and will always remain a strong supporter of the succinct, the concise and the accessible. Life is very short.
Our first tutorial paper was called The Dialectics of Inside and Outside. It took me quite a while to get a handle on it and now I remember it only for its title. When I finally broke through the language barrier, I realised it was a very complicated way of stating something rather obvious. I found that reprehensible. Academia was clearly not for me.
It’s great that tutors care so much about teaching that they’d give a lot of thought to the basic craft of teaching.
It’s interesting that shyness has been mentioned here. I have a workmate doing a part-time uni course and I’m amazed at just how much public speaking and how many presentations are required. Considering the size of many tutorials, what happens to students who are painfully shy and just aren’t any good at public speaking? Do they have an alternative or do they just fail? Are only extroverts allowed to go to uni nowadays? It must be murder for that large chunk of the population that would rather do anything but public speaking.
Twenty or thirty years ago public speaking just wasn’t a requirement for most courses.
P.S. I can only suggest a flick through of Hugh Mackay’s “Why People Don’t Listen” – a great book.
I don’t use seating charts but I do use rolls with notes e.g. “Laura – red hair” “Simon – glasses” etc.
I then mentally test myself by looking along a row of seats and seeing if I can remember the names without looking at the notes. Anyone I don’t know I check, look at them and then repeat the name mentally as I do so.
And use names as frequently as you can. It sounds boring to you but the students don’t really notice that you’ve used “Rebecca” three times in a sentence.
I’ve found I can memorise a class full (I’m talking secondary school here) within a couple of days.
The student chart is a good one. I use a version of it, in handing out a piece of paper for students to write down their names each class. Not only does this give you a rough order for quick referencing, when you get to the end of the semester it’s easy to count up how many times people attended and if need be prove it to recalcitrant students with their own hand writing.
I like some ice-breaker games, but my main tactic for good discussion (as a politics lecturer/tutor) is simply to be controversial. You have to be able to be fair and always ready to acknowledge good points or counter-arguments, but the more controversy you can generate, the more people will be willing to jump in and have a go. For this Bush Jnr. was a god send. Just say you agree with anything he did and whoosh the tutorial would kick into gear.
I also found making the conversation as personal as possible was a good way of avoiding limp discussions where students clearly hadn’t done the reading. So when talking about welfare or development ask about students own experience. What motivated them, what they thought would inspire them in such circumstances. Once people make the connection from the abstract theory to the world as they live it, they will remember it for the rest of the semester (beyond that good luck!). Likewise show photos, or give biographies of the individuals you are talking about. So that Mill, Marx and Plato are real figures, with flaws and follies and bad haircuts, for students to identify with the material.
And you have to be able to lose your temper occasionally. Once or twice a semester, no more, but the tutor who can’t, wont be able to control a disruptive or lazy class. (In this being a 6′2 guy helps, I’ve often seen that tall male tutors have a much easier time than smaller female ones)
I appreciated tutors who really knew their stuff and had distilled things into clear, understandable bits (“existentialism = existence precedes essence” etc), let you know what you had to do to pass, and what you had to do to earn their respect.
But I loved the tutors who loved their subjects. You could tell if the stuff still excited them, was an essential part of their lives, and that whatever a student said about it was worth considering and discussing, because every aspect of the thing was of irresistible interest.
The only tutoring I did was teaching English to foreigners – for years – and the trick was to find what subjects they were comfortable talking about. Oh, and providing written out lyrics to current pop songs – that, however, could take you into explanations way beyond safe topics.
As a student I have to say it helps if you make a couple of jokes during the tutorial, even if they are just simple stock jokes that everyone seems to make. This helps to drag in my attention (Speaking as someone who generally has a short attention span) and retain it. Further, try not to be too dictatorial about mumbled comments and jokes – if I am able to make these I find I will pay closer attention, if only in the hope of finding a good line to set me up for some witty comment.
Just a couple of random thoughts.
Ah yes, the curse of fashionable first name clusters. Puts me in mind of the year when I taught a year 12 class of 20 students including six girls called Amanda. And none of them wanted to be called Mandy, not that one can blame them.
In general, though, the memory palace system does work well, although it’s probably best not to take too much other advice on people management from Hannibal Lecter. (Learn that lesson the hard way.)
Only 14 names on that memory chart. That would be nice. Try it with 31.
The best uni tute I ever gave at the start I got each student to share something significant that had happened to them recently and then each one had to share which other student’s story interested them most and why. They bonded very quickly. During the second round of sharing one student said “Really the most significant thing that happened to me recently was I got divorced last week. I couldn’t share that first up but now I think I can.” The group quickly felt they knew one-another and virtually everyone contributed regularly.
However, after a few weeks I began to feel they were relying on me too much to keep discussion going so I put a sign on the door saying “May be a few minutes late. Please come in and start without me.” Then I went off and kicked a football with a friend for most of the hour. When I turned up at the end of the tute, they all said they’d had a very good tute and didn’t really need me. The lesson was learnt.
The tute went swimingly for the rest of the year.
How do I know it was the best? The only first class honour and two of the three second class honours in that subject that year all came out of that one tute. And nobody failed.
I’m with Robert! Try it with 7 tutes 20+. Or working across three universities at once.
I realised something last night about my own teaching style first semester last year, both lecturing and tutoring. I had somehow assumed as part of my teacherly disposition to teach to an ideal/perfect student. Maybe some part of my subconscious thought this made me the ideal educator? Don’t know. Most students don’t come close to being ideal. Anyway, it buggers up one’s classes because not all students want to learn, some want to be taught, and in certain university workplaces you are expected to teach.
Oh for those with a stutter or the like, and I don’t mean a nervous stutter, a trick I learnt to help you speak is to have a piece of paper in front of you and write down any block words/sounds that you know are coming up as you say them. You do say them, too. I figured this out once when writing down a word to look up something about later. Then I told my students in the lecture I was delivering that I was taking notes on them as they took notes on the lecture.
A sense of humour is probably good…
Only 14 names on that memory chart. That would be nice. Try it with 31.
In an ideal world, I think between 12 and 15 is about the right size for a tutorial group – enough to get discussion going, not so many that people have to fight for airtime. I had 20 in one of my tutorials last semester, in a very poorly designed room. It took me about six weeks to remember all their names. I’m not helped by not being all that good at facial recognition, so I rely on other clues (hair styles, glasses, whatever). That can make things difficult when a student gets a haircut.
I used to go round the table expecting each person to comment on the topic/text being studied.. “Same as him/her” was not an acceptable answer. One story I heard from a fellow student way back when I was an undergrad was about a tutor (who, incidentally was brilliant and one of the best teachers I’ve ever had) who had a primary souce text set for discussion. When the students filed into the room and sat down this tutor held the text up and asked who’s read this from cfover to cover? Only three out of twelve students put up their hands. The tutor told the rest to line up outside the tutorial room for the whole hour and remain lined up as the tutot wouldn’t waste their time with them as they couldn’t contribute meaningfully to the discussion.And, so far as I know, they did. I don’t know if this was a legend, but if isn’t true it ought to be.
When I went to a school reunion one of the now retired teachers could not only remember the names of most of the people there but also the street they used to live in – not bad after 20 years!
I think it very much depends on the course. The engineering subject tutorials I had were much much larger (easily 50+) and worked fine as people weren’t really there for a group discussion, but help on very specific problems. The tutor(s) just wandered around the various sub groups which formed in the room.
50 or more! Bloody hell.
I teach philosophy and political theory. Very talky subjects.
Yes, this is a common problem at Australian universities.
Ming-Lei is cute.
Just sayin’.
Yeah that’s on the high side but not unheard of. When I was doing history tutorials three or four years ago the only class I had with fewer than 25 students was the 9am Monday that nobody wanted to go to (including the tutor I might add).
Paul, these days your students would spontaneously organise an act of protest against such treatment: they’re consumers, they see themselves as customers of a product, and view their rights in that framework. Anyway, it’s kind of an arsehole thing to do no matter what the political economy of the university.
My last tip to tutors would be to get familiar with the Excremental Theory of Graduate Education (which I learned about thanks to Laura).
Things I liked in tutes:
- Avoid questions along the lines of “what do you think of x?”
- direct questions at specific people
- a tutor should guide and manage the group discussion, not have one-on-ones with certain students.
- so bring out the arguments in those who seem reluctant to make them: “John, that was an interesting point, can you expand on that some more?”
- don’t repeat the lecture, but do follow up on themes from the lecture
- don’t ask people to summarise the week’s reading
- set specific questions in advance on the readings which will frame the debate/discussion
and my cute story as a tutor was when two students showed up late after a lunch BBQ, but had brought me a beer (in plastic cup), so had to smile….
m
Correct. (I’m five-four and female myself, so know this to be true.) And of course if you’re a woman and you lose your temper, they immediately brand you as an awful bitch and cower away from you for the rest of the semester because you remind them of Mum yelling at them and anyway everyone knows women aren’t supposed to lose their tempers, are they, it’s not feminine, is it. Other means of maintaining order must be found.
I love losing my temper occasionally when I lecture as the student don’t seem to expect it. I come in well under 5 foot tall. I once had a student refer to me as a ‘dwarf’. It was when I ran into him on campus and he said ‘I didn’t, like, realise you’re, like, a dwarf. You look much taller when you lecture’. One look and he was shaking. Felt sorry for him, actually. But I think women are expected to take on a lot more of students’ personal problems. I try to take a fairly strict line about this ‘cos I’m a casual and I really don’t want to deal with their dramas, even the real ones.
I try to take a fairly strict line about this ‘cos I’m a casual and I really don’t want to deal with their dramas, even the real ones.
Me either, for the same reason. I get paid casual rates, not a salary. I refer them to the rules – go to Student Counselling, get a signed note, then you may have your extension. Even better – go see the course controller and sie may sort the issues out.
Liam @ 27,
Don’t know if the event described had any repercussions. Never heard. (I wasn’t the tutor, btw.)Nor did I hear of any similar events.
Mostly classes I had were 12 or 14, very easy to manage. Once when I took two tutes at once, (for a colleague) and had 30 students it was basically a waste of time.
But I do have the rather old-fashioned idea that students come to uni to learn (and learning takes hard work), not to party or play football.
The only time I ever minded dealing with their dramas was when their dramas had been caused by the behaviour of some of my male colleagues, who, while I dried tears and listened to very long tales of woe, were off doing the research for the publications that would get them promoted. I wrote about this (among other things) at length elsewhere *gulp* eleven years ago. From what I can make out, not that much has changed.
That’s a marvellous essay, Dr Cat, ‘though I now have a full carillion playing in my head.
I left my permanent salaried academic job for many and complex reasons. My problems were, shall we say, exacerbated by a female colleague who simply wouldn’t play nicely when it came to sharing administrative duties. But increasingly, I recognise that her strategy may have been correct.
My technique for dealing with the problem of underprepared students is this: week 1, I tell everyone that if they can’t get reading done – which in English means not managing to read quite long & hard literary texts, usually – they should come to class anyway, try to contribute, and not feel bad about it – happens to everybody at some point.
I don’t ever tell anyone off for not having read the text. Doesn’t matter to me. When they work out they won’t get in trouble or be embarrassed they then are willing to talk about however much of the book they have managed to read, which is a lot better than nothing.
When students work so much, and lots of mine have got heavy family responsibilities too, I don’t feel inclined to punish them for not managing to do all their reading.
@ PC no.33
I just read your essay and then the responses. How depressing. “I was failed by a woman! Therefore women are in charge/evil.” “I’ve never seen it, therefore it doesn’t exist.” etc etc. I don’t blame you for leaving it behind.
Yeah, those responses are just ludicrous. They manage to not discuss your article so carefully.
They still use corporal punishment at uni, don’t they?
Great essay, Pav. What a loss to academia you are.
Not that it deserved you!
I would not have raised this, but someobody else did. If your students think you are an “awful bitch”, you should listen to them a bit more respectfully. Rather than dismiss them as suffering from ‘mummy issues’ perhaps consider the possibility your students are pretty perceptive, and you actually are.
Hmmm, good point DF.
OR! Students can bite my ass AND THEN tell me how yummy it is, through the medium of contemporary dance.
I’ll award marks out of 20, while perusing a cheese platter.
Way to miss the point, DF.
DF has mummy issues.
One thing that makes a lot of difference to the quality of tutorials: good unit design. If the unit is badly designed, and the purpose of the tutorials is unclear to tutors or students, then you have set a series of traps for tutors to fall into. If a unit convener can’t tell you what the tutorials are supposed to do when asked, or if their answer is unsatisfactory, then this is a bad sign.
Just give them all 64, LE.
Is that bit of matter on the floor at #40 a sockpuppet? Looks like one.
One of my preferred techniques (especially in the big tutorials which the bean counters are inflicting on us these days) is to get the students to break into small groups for most of the tutorial and then report back on the fruits of their discussions at the end. This is good for getting the less assertive students engaged in discussion.
A question to others: how do you go about making sense of students’ text responses to course and teaching evaluations? And would I be right in guessing that there’s a gendered dimension to the phenomenon of students writing off-topic and off-colour comments about their lecturers’ and tutors’ appearance, dress, demeanour, etc.?
Paul Norton: a friend tells me
i) although the “open” question allows all kinds of off-topic silliness, it occasionally allows a student to make a useful and/or perceptive comment, which Likert-scale questionnaires with poorly written or vague or inapplicable questions, simply do not.
ii) One time he received one student response “too many jokes” and another “not enough jokes” in the same class. He assumed these boys had been sitting next to each other while filling in the form.
iii) His response? 28% fewer jokes, but the mean quality of the jokes was increased by 46%, weighted for customer responsiveness, world’s best practice; and peer reviewed by a benchmarking panel endorsed by the relevant Go8 committee.
I had a lecturer in a Masters of International Relations course whose theory was that long silences are completely unendurable to humans in groups. He was quite happy to reveal his theory early on: he said that if he asked a question and nobody responded, we would all wait in complete silence until somebody finally cracked and said something. He said it would always take less than 60 seconds, and he was right (although one time we got to about 58 seconds before somebody cracked).
The eventual speaker would usually be one of the class talkers or swots (I was one); but if somebody spoke too often in any given (three-hour) class, they would get a yellow card (warning) then a red card, and weren’t allowed to say anything more for the rest of that class. Then the silences would last longer, but still less than a minute. And eventually it would be the really quiet people who felt compelled to say something to break the silence. It was brutal and awkward, but remarkably effective.
I don’t know why you are all jumping on Delicio Felicio, as lots of tutors, and I hate to say it, especially women ARE complete bitches. Perhaps the one’s above protest too much.
“Perhaps the one’s above protest too much.”
Even if that did make grammatical sense Sammy R, it wouldn’t have an apostrophe.
Lefty E
OK, let’s require Sammy.R to prepare a 20 minute tute paper for next week, “Five Common Misuses of the Apostrophe”. I believe it should be peer-assessed by some of the other students. Shall we say, all the female students?
To a little charmer like yourself, Sammy R, they may well be. Human endurance has its limits.
Returning to the point of the post, Michael D at #28 mentions the single most productive tutoring technique I ever stumbled across, which is to encourage students who have given brief answers to expand on them: ‘That was an interesting point, can you talk about it some more?’ This is also a very handy technique when people ask curly questions from the audience at seminars or conferences.
At least two of the best teachers/tutors I had at uni were women. One of them changed my life by literally showing me how to think abstractly. (A lot of spastics seem to be pretty concrete thinkers until they learn otherwise.) The worst tutor I ever had at uni was a bloke – no names no pack drill – but he was the only one who was hopeless. Just sayin’.