4th March 2013 9:00
By Blue Tutors
Last week started with a lot of work on online tuition. I’m now adding new pages thick and fast, and it’s really starting to come together. I’ve never designed a whole section of our site in this way before, having created a brand new architecture for everything. It was frustrating at first, but has made creating new pages ridiculously easy, so has been well worth the effort.
I also did some more tutor assessments on Thursday last week, which were fun, as always, but I’m starting to notice that setting lesson goals is generally something which is done much more poorly than the other skills that we look for. I think this is because setting a lesson goal is seen as the easiest skill, so tutors only glance over our advice. The most common mistake is a tutor saying “today we’re going to talk about......”, and then, realising that that’s not measurable at all, follow up by saying “so that you will understand it better”.
I remember when I was a fresh young tutor, and I had dreams about having fantastically intellectual lessons, where I could stretch my students beyond what they needed to know, and have really interesting discussions. However, I quickly realised that, while this does occasionally happen (which is lovely), it’s quite rare, and not something a tutor should try to force. I think new tutors are concerned that setting a good lesson goal (‘plan an essay’, or ‘answer these questions’) will mean they won’t have such an interesting discussion, and that, in the assessment, we might see them as boring and fixated on results. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth, and the lessons with very specific measurable lessons are always the best and most interesting for me.