500 Tips for Tutors

Sally Brown, Phil Race

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134292073
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book presents over 500 practical suggestions designed to help tutors establish active learning amongst their students. Divided into useful sections the tips cover the entire range of teaching and learning situations and comprise a 'start anywhere', dip-in resource suitable for both the newcomer and the old hand.

Intended mainly for the university or college lecturer involved in learner-centred learning, this resource offers fresh ideas and food for thought on six broad areas of the job:

• getting the students going
• starting off, and working together
• the programme itself - lectures, assignments and feedback
• helping students to learn from resources
• assessment: demonstrating evidence of achievement
• skills for career and life in general.

This lively and stimulating book will prove invaluable to lecturers, tutors, teachers, trainers and staff developers.

Chapter 1

Getting your students going

1 Helping students to prepare to start learning

2 Helping students to explore how they learn best

3 Helping students to develop time-management skills

4 Helping students to develop task-management skills

5 Helping students to identify the questions they need to answer

6 Helping students to read more actively

7 Helping students to get their heads round what they've learned

8 Organising your studies: a checklist for students

In this section, we start by looking at ways in which your students can be helped to do some useful preparation before they start your programme, then suggest how you can help them explore their own learning strategies. Then we remind you of a selection of general study skills that can be useful to students throughout their studies, or on particular occasions.

1

Helping students to prepare to start learning

Before the start of a programme or module, there may be a vacation or other slack time when students could, if they wished, do much to pave their way towards success. To be able to do so, they need to know what might be useful things for them to do to prepare for your programme. Here are some ways to help them.

1 Make sure they're given appropriate information. For example, try to ensure that students are given printed documentation about your programme (or your part of a course) some time in advance. A syllabus, for example, can be a useful start – better still, a programme or module handbook. If you know they've all got appropriate access, such material can be useful online.

2 Get them pre-reading. Give them a list providing some ideas about useful sources to consult before the programme begins. The shorter and more focused such a list is, the more likely it is that students will try to do some pre-reading.

3 Tell them why. Explain why it's useful to study each major piece, and give positive suggestions regarding what students should try to extract from each source. Arming students with lists of questions can be a very productive way of helping them focus their reading. Build in tasks to accompany their pre-reading, including specific short tasks, such as ‘from Chapter 3 of Smith and Jones work out the three most important questions to ask about Bloggs's theory’.

4 Alert students to the intended learning outcomes. The sooner they know about the standards they will eventually need to achieve, the more they can adjust their expectations about your programme. Giving examples of aims, learning outcomes, relevant assessment criteria and last year's exam questions can be useful ways of helping students to tune in to the level of your programme.

5 Consider giving them a pre-learning package. Although this may take some time for you to put together, it can serve a valuable role in years to come. It can help to provide you with an identified starting level for the whole group. A useful package will be a mixture of information, references, tasks and activities, with particular attention being given to designing printed responses to the tasks and activities, so that students working alone through the pre-course package have the benefit of feedback on their attempts.

6 Give them a pre-programme checklist. For example, provide students with a list of ‘useful things to do before starting this programme’. Some of these things could involve brushing up on relevant past learning. Other elements could include ideas and thoughts to collect together, and perhaps suggestions for a little preliminary experimentation or fieldwork.

7 Advise them on what to bring to the first sessions on the programme. Such advice is always welcomed by students. However, they need something better than a list of the recommended reading. They need a ‘user-friendly’ guide to what will be really useful in the first days of the programme. It can be useful to enlist the help of some students who have finished the programme (successfully) to put together a ‘what to get beforehand’ checklist.

8 Get last year's students to help this year's students to find their feet. Try getting past students to draft a letter to new students, which can be a valuable way of breaking the ice with the new students. This is particularly relevant when your contribution is at the very start of an entire programme. Such letters can be accompanied by up-to-date information – for example, the times and places of the first few components of your part of their programme.

9 It's never too early to point students towards the study skills they will need to develop. It can be useful to recommend one or two useful sources of study skills advice that are directly relevant to your programme or module (or better still, write some key suggestions yourself).

10 Don't send too much information! When sending out ideas for pre-programme preparation, ensure that students won't feel snowed under by a mass of paperwork. If it all looks too daunting, they'll probably do none of it – and maybe they won't arrive at all. A ‘front sheet’ summarising the bits and pieces in your ‘pre-programme’ pack – and with several marked ‘optional’ – can help students take a balanced view of it all.

2

Helping students to explore how they learn best

The more students know about the processes by which they learn best, the more they can harness those processes to their advantage. It is useful to build in some study-skills discussion right at the beginning of your programme, alongside the first bits of learning. Students will then see that you're interested in helping them find out not only what to learn, but also how best to go about it. The following ideas can be used to help students take ownership of some key steps in the ways they learn.

1 Start with their achievements. Ask your students to think of something they're good at, and to jot it down.

2 Get them thinking about how they have already achieved things. For example, ask them to write down a few words explaining how they became good at whatever it was.

3 Get them reflecting on how they learned things well. Help them compare their responses to the previous two questions. For example, most students will have used words such as ‘doing it’, ‘practice’, ‘repetition’, ‘trial and error’, ‘getting it wrong at first’. Use these ideas to help them see that most learning is done in an active way. Remind them how useful it can be to learn by making mistakes, and how therefore it is useful to regard mistakes as valuable learning experiences.

4 Help them see that ‘learning’ is down to them. We can't do it for them! Comment on how rarely people declare that they became good at something simply by ‘being taught’ or ‘being shown how’, and so on. From this, draw out the need for students to take an active part in the various teaching–learning situations they encounter, rather than sitting passively ‘being taught and hoping it will stick’.

5 Ask students to think of something they feel good about. Ask them (for example) to identify a personal attribute or quality about which they feel a sense of pride, and then to jot it down. Next, ask them to write down a few words explaining upon what basis they feel good about whatever they wrote down in answer to the previous question. In other words, ask them, ‘Upon what evidence do you have this positive feeling?’

6 Help students to realise how important feedback can be. By far the most frequent answers to ‘how do you know you feel good about this?’ include phrases such as ‘other people's reactions’, ‘feedback from other people’, ‘the expressions on people's faces’, ‘people come back to me for help’, and so on. In other words, the keys to positive feelings tend to be feedback, and other people. This can be a useful way of helping students develop a healthy ‘thirst for feedback’ rather than trying to hide from situations where other people see how they're doing.

7 Remind students that studying is not a completely separate part of their lives. The same processes that lead to becoming good at anything in life also apply to successful studying. Similarly, the same processes that lead to positive feelings about anything in life also apply to developing positive feelings about studying.

8 Help students to learn from disasters as well as triumphs. Ask them to think of some learning experience that went wrong, and to write down a few words about what happened to make it an unsuccessful learning experience.

9 Help them to compare the causes of poor learning experiences. Common causes relate to a lack of feedback (therefore lack of positive feelings) and to lack of opportunity to practise (therefore a lack of ‘learning by doing’). Other causes are lack of motivation – in other words, no deep wish to succeed – or a lack of time to make sense of it all, or no time to reflect.

10 Highlight for your students the main factors underpinning successful (and enjoyable) learning. These are:

• wanting to learn – a sense of purpose;

• needing to learn – being clear about their targets and the standards to aim for, knowing why things are important;

• learning by doing – practice, experimentation, repetition, trial and error;

• feedback – from each other, from tutors, from handouts, from Web sources, all leading to positive feeling about what has been learned;

• making sense of what has been learned – getting their heads round it, ‘digesting’ it, putting it into perspective.

It can be useful to keep reminding students of the importance of all these factors as they continue into your programme, and helping them work out ways of taking ownership of the importance of these factors as they develop their learning processes in the context of the content of your programme.

3

Helping students to develop time-management skills

The same number of hours in each day is given to everyone, but time-management skills are widely underdeveloped. If we can manage our time well, we can manage just about everything else. The ten suggestions that follow can help students increase their mastery over time.

1 Help students to see what's in it for them to become better at time management. Help them to work out the benefits of well-developed time-management skills. Help them to see that personal productivity, personal efficiency and personal effectiveness are all connected to their ability to manage time. Allow them to work out that time-management skills have lifelong value and enhance all their other skills and aptitudes – and in due course enhance their employability too.

2 Get students thinking consciously about learning pay-off. Ask them what kinds of activity have a high pay-off in terms of learning. These can include discussing, explaining, summarising, problem-solving and quizzing each other. Ask them what kinds of activity have low learning pay-off; these can include writing in copying mode, reading passively, and appearing to listen. Time is too precious to squander on actions that have only low learning pay-off.

3 Help students to stop and look back. Get them to reflect on things they have learned, rather than simply hope that the learning has happened by magic. Ask them to work out how their learning happened, exactly what they learned, exactly when the learning happened, and how it can be made more efficient next time.

4 Help students to spare themselves from the effects of procrastination. Show them how wasteful and miserable just thinking about work can be – compared with simply getting on with it. Time spent thinking about work has associations with a guilty conscience, and looming tasks. Time spent after work has been successfully completed is high-quality time – the most enjoyable sort of time. But recognise that this is a counsel of perfection, which we ourselves don't always abide by!

5 Encourage students to get stuck in straight away. Remind them how often 90 per cent of things tend to get done in the last 10 per cent of the time available. Point out that it is therefore logical that most things can be done in the first 10 per cent of the time available – leading to the luxury of having much more genuinely ‘free’ time. Hint at the positive feelings and confidence that come with always having things done well ahead of schedule – and indeed the security of knowing that there is room to accommodate the odd unexpected hiccup or crisis.

6 Get students to set stage deadlines for themselves. Encourage them to set several stage deadlines rather than one final deadline. Encourage them to break large tasks into manageable chunks. Encourage them to set deadlines ‘early’ to allow for the unexpected.

7 Help students feel positive about getting ahead of schedule. Point out the benefit of doing half an hour's work on a non-urgent task each time before starting an urgent one. The urgent one will still get done, as there is pressure to complete it...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• 500 Tips for Tutors
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface to the second edition
• Chapter 1 Getting your students going
• Chapter 2 Starting off, and working together
• Chapter 3 The programme itself: lectures, assignments and feedback
• Chapter 4 Helping students to learn from resources
• Chapter 5 Assessment: demonstrating evidence of achievement
• Chapter 6 Skills for career and life in general
• Some further reading
• Index