Teaching a tutorial

From Sustainability Methods

Teaching a tutorial can be a great stepping stone to get initiated in teaching, and thus gaining first experience in how to structure yourself and approach your audience. The most important thing when teaching a tutorial is to teach in the spirit and conduct that serves the larger module that you are a part of. Your tutorial is gonna accompany a lecture or seminar, and you need to clarify from the get go what your contribution is in the context of the bigger picture.

Tutorials typically clarify knowledge and often provide a more interactive and hands-on version with the knowledge the students are supposed to gain. Tutorials are thus more about experience. If there are several tutorials, consistency between the tutorial teachers is key. Students look constantly for reasons why they do not understand, and if your tutorial is different from another tutorial, students will claim that one tutorial is better and another is worse for them. This is a problem, hence weekly meetings to align between the teachers of the tutorials and the teacher of the lecture or seminar can be an important catalyst towards consistency. These weekly meetings can also be understood as planning sessions for each appointment, as the sum of the ideas of several teachers will always exceed your own skills. Ideally, make a timeline that contains enough leeway to have a core curriculum and in addition an optional set of exercises that can be done if time permits.

You always need to remember that understanding is deeply personal, yet it is an illusion that people understand something in a specific moment. Instead understanding is like a bucket that slowly fills up and at some point flows over. Yet our brain tricks us into believing that it was this overflow moment when we understood. This is a misleading understanding of learning. Instead we need to make sure to continuously fill the bucket, and to do that for as many students as possible. Therefore, within a tutorial you need to approach the wider group, and cannot preoccupy yourself with problems of specific individuals that are not relevant for the wider group. Deal with individual problems after the tutorial. Yet take the decision to prioritise on problems of the wider group.

Within tutorials, you should make use of the smaller group size to get students actively engaged. A rule of thumb could be to engage students with a different exercise or form of input every 20 minutes. You can give them input for 20 minutes, but then you need to shift to group work, for example. Group work makes a central form in teaching to get students actively engaged. After some initial input in the beginning of the session, give instructions and have groups set up to allow the students to work in smaller groups. But be aware, if you let students choose their groups, most of them will feel more cozy at first, but will eventually learn less compared to random groups. In addition, do random groups have a lesser risk of alienating minorities and different learners. However, this only works if you are willing as a teacher to give clear instructions and mitigate in case of struggles. Make sure that all groups are up to speed by communicating the timeline, and give advice and smaller steps along the way to keep the students on roughly the same level. After the group work try to summarize struggles and solutions, and walk students ideally through the exercises. An important point within the tutorial is to form a team with the other teachers. It is tempting to try to show everyone that you can teach best, but do not let your ego take control, because it will be the loss of the learners, and ultimately yourself. A rookie mistake of beginner teachers is to pretend towards the students to be in some sort of a conspiracy in decoding the main teacher of the lecture. Do not do that. Almost all tutorial teachers are beginners, and experience in teaching is something you built over time. Make sure to encourage a positive attitude towards the lecture and other forms of the module, because only together you can make sure that the students learn best. You can bring up issues towards the lead teacher in the preparation group, but in the classroom, you are part of a team. Pretending that you can decode the lecture for the students does not only disempower the students, but also neglects your good relationship with the overall team. This is not the kind of environment you want to create. Always work as a team, with the learning of the students as a main goal.

The last step you need to do as a teacher in a tutorial is to help design a fair exam. Since you are part of a larger team, it can be helpful to meet before the exam and discuss which questions are suitable to test the students, and who can confirm that the respective knowledge was taught in the lecture or tutorial. Making a diverse yet fair exam in the larger team is one of the highest standard that one can aim for. It is necessary to integrate the diversity and ingenuity of a team in order to make a balanced exam.

All of the above will also translate into a high workload for yourself. All tutorial teachers recognize that teaching is yet another level of understanding. Therefore, engage early with what you need to teach, and make sure that you feel ok with the material. Do not overthink it. Instead, just state if you do not know something, and look it up until next week. You can also ask the team leader in case of tricky questions. Then you will recognize that you teaching effort will build over time, and you need less and less preparation time. This is helpful, because it will help you to gain experience for more complicated teaching formats such as seminars and lectures. Tutorials are a good starting point. If you can seize this opportunity, go for it. Teaching is the best form of learning.

The author of this entry is Henrik von Wehrden.