20th January 2014 9:00
By Blue Tutors
Last week I received an interesting email from a tutor following his assessment. He actually did very well, but asked about our critique of his lesson goal. I was the assessor, so in a good position to give him a detailed explanation of my decisions. The lesson had been set up as one of ‘discovery’, and the introduction I was given was that I should select a shape on the screen, behind which would be something we would discuss. It transpired that the lesson was about punctuation in sentences, and how the meaning can be changed through punctuation. I found it really interesting, but I had no idea what we were trying to achieve, and I still don’t.
It’s a really common problem for tutors not to understand why they should set lesson goals. I’ve come to the conclusion that all of our other teaching ideas give tutors pause for thought, but lesson goals don’t because they are seen as a much more banal and rudimentary. It’s counter-intuitive, but the easiest skill is the most commonly badly exhibited one.
In the case of this particular assessment, the tutor wanted to encourage me to have an epiphany about punctuation, but the lesson was set up in such a vague way that he had to lead me in the direction that he wanted the lesson to take, and so the independent learning he was hoping for was actually just the opposite; I could have gone off on many different tangents, and it was only the tutor’s questions which led me towards the goal he wanted us to achieve. The advice I always give to tutors is that they have to stop seeing teaching as something like a magic trick; the lesson shouldn’t finish with a ‘reveal’ at the end to which the student reacts with amazement. Lessons are so much more productive when it is the student who is the magician, the student should know how the trick ends before it starts.