Negatives
- conflicting expectations - of students, tutor and department.
- student passivity - students wanted a second lecture, dept wanted debate, tutor wanted student preparation for tutorials
- lack of preparation - was the reality for many, some prepared and didn't discuss, a very few prepared and discussed.
- superficial discussion - from those who hadn't prepared clogged up the space for those who had something worth saying.
- community was possible - students enjoyed sitting and talking before the tutorial began or walking with me part of the way home together.
- disciplining was possible - but this tended only to get to the egregious cases
- authenticity of participants could be established - students could size me up and I them. Discipline and encouragement was taking place within established understandings of who we were.
- Tutorials should be voluntary. If students didn't come then that was their choice. I disliked having to take a roll call every class and I thought this only reinforced the old template of school pupils and teacher - student dependency in other words.
- Assignments were important, but encouraged students to prepare only for those specific topics they would be assessed on. That meant their knowledge was patchy, they wanted me, especially nearing exams to fill in those holes in their knowledge - not only in terms of course material, but revision and exams techniques.
- I would have had a couple of tutorials set aside for spontaneous assessments. Perhaps a multiple choice question paper or a paper in which answers would have been no more than a paragraph in length or perhaps a question requiring a short essay of perhaps 2 sides max. The design would have been looking to assess breadth of knowledge.
- Set assignments would have continued to be part of the course but shorter and still aiming for depth.
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