14th August 2012 9:00
By Blue Tutors
Unfortunately Laura’s away this week, which is obviously nice for her, but means that I’m covering her work and trying to get something done myself. At least there hasn’t been the distraction of the Olympics since Sunday.
I can’t believe how much easier it’s been to categorise all of our subjects now that I’ve created the page which displays them all nicely. Before we were using a pen and paper, and everything just looked like a bit of a mess, if not for me, then certainly for the people who have been helping me. However, you can now actually see how each discipline is categorised in a nice little electronic table.
I did some more assessments last week as well, and I’ve really noticed how the quality of tutors’ lessons have changed over the last 2 or 3 years, since we started the style of assessment that we now have. I think that many tutors used to read only the first part of our instructions; once they realised the task was to teach 10 minutes of a lesson, that was it, and the tutors went away to plan the lesson without reading our teaching guidelines. I think that our assessment is more renowned now, and tutors realise that anyone turning up without reading our guidelines on tutoring techniques, generally doesn’t do very well (they tend to lecture, and focus on explaining clearly, rather than eliciting response from the student.... me on this occasion).