When Teaching Large Classes, Think Like a Tutor - Teo-Education

Often faculty who teach large classes (and some who don?t) fantasize about sitting down and working individually with students. For many of us that?s the ideal teaching scenario, but for most of us teaching realities are far removed from this ideal. You can?t tutor individual students when faced with 100 of them. Or can you?

Biologists Wood and Tanner undertook an interesting project. They decided to look at the research on tutoring to see if the characteristics of effective tutors had been identified. Then they explored whether any of the techniques used by effective tutors could be used by teachers in large courses. In their paper (reference below), ?we present specific approaches for adapting effective tutoring strategies and applying them to large biology lecture classes.? (p. 3) Using a set of effective tutor characteristics identified by Lepper and Wolverton (a reference to their research is in the article), Wood and Tanner explore how these seven characteristics can be adapted and used in large lecture courses (and what they propose isn?t applicable just in biology courses). Here are some of the suggestions offered for each tutor characteristic.

Applying characteristics of tutors in a large classroom setting
Intelligent?The best tutors know their content. They are experts in the true sense of the word, but they also know a lot about how students learn and the best ways to teach certain kinds of content. Faculty have that same kind of content expertise, but many don?t know a lot about how students learn and how they should teach, given what is known about how students learn. That knowledge can be acquired (whether you teach large or small classes), and it can be used to successfully implement the strategies about to be described.

by Maryellen Weimer, PhD

Read more @ http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/effective-teaching-strategies/when-teaching-large-classes-think-like-a-tutor/

This entry was posted on Monday, June 24th, 2013 at 8:17 am and is filed under Effective Teaching and Learning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Source: http://www.teo-education.com/teo/?p=25864

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