The Jewel Analyzed

From THE OXFORD TUTORIAL: "Thanks, you taught me how to think" (beware: MSWord link), edited by David Palfreyman.

THE JEWEL ANALYSED

Yet the only detailed assessment of the true worth of the [Oxford & Cambridge] tutorial system dates back to the 1960s, when Will G. Moore, Fellow and Tutor of St John's College, published in 1968 The Tutorial System and its Future. Moore describes what a tutorial is:

At its most simple the tutorial is a weekly meeting of the student with the teacher to whom he is especially committed. This does not replace other methods, such as instruction by lecture or in class. It clearly cannot replace private study. Indeed, it assumes all these, and includes their results in the preparation of a weekly essay, which is presented orally, listened to by the tutor and discussed immediately. The whole process—of reading, discussion, arrangements for the following week—takes up little more than an hour.

A usual feature of the method is informality [...] It opens with a few questions as to how the student has "got on" with his subject and a brief confession on his part, perhaps that he liked it better than he expected to, or that he was conscious that he had not covered the ground nor uncovered the real problem within the subject. Then the reading, interrupted at will by the tutor, and at times by the student, followed by perfunctory praise or thanks and then by detailed comments, which the student is free to take down or not as he prefers. This part can be either free interchange of points or painfully one-sided information. The final minutes are devoted to suggestions and hints about next week's subject and the session ends when the next pupil knocks on the tutor's door or when the first pupil departs to a lecture or the tutor to a meeting, or, indeed, when either side feels that the other is losing interest.

Not all tutorials are like this. As in other living forms of education, the norm is not the rule. Endless variations are possible, and are, indeed, produced by circumstances. Two, or even three, pupils may be present; one will be asked to read and the other to hand in his essay. A busy tutor may ask for a summary of the main points of two or three essays, weaving them into a single discussion. Either side may refuse to play its traditional part: the pupil may bring no essay, or one not his own; he may rely on confession, of failure, of interruption ("parent crisis" said one once), of illness. The tutor may bypass discussion for analysis, of documents, of problems. He may be tempted by the astute pupil into defence of his own writings. A single hour may be inadequate for a lively or complicated discussion. Some tutors "run over", getting later as the morning wears on; others leave two or more hours free for the good performers. I have dismissed bored pupils after 50 minutes and, at the other end of the scale, a philosophy tutorial starting at noon may well not finish until college lunch is over. (pp 15/16)

Moore recognises that the Tutorial is not readily subject to, in the modern jargon, "quality control":

"What happens in a tutorial depends so much on the two or three personalities taking part in the exercise that the keynote is variety: almost anything may happen. A colleague looking in on a neighbour's tutorial found that nothing at all seemed to be happening, and concluded that both parties were asleep. The picture of an undergraduate being "smoked at" by a laconic and occasionally oracular tutor may be true, but it is not typical, for many other pictures would be no less true. Students vary, especially when on their own: some pretend to be stupid, some are stupid, some are lazy and plausible, some are easily discouraged, few work well without praise, many conceal their real attitudes, not many are able to help the tutor to be both clear and interesting. Teachers vary no less, and any good teacher will vary his tactic. Not many of us, I think, manage to be both concise and interesting. There are times to be cryptic, and to be plain, to be sarcastic, and to be sympathetic, to expatiate and to hint. Experience has taught me that, whatever the tactic, one's best formulae may fall on deaf ears, and one's inanities may be remembered. Reception of wisdom seems to have less to do with the wisdom than with the sense on the part of the disciple that he can contribute, that his role is not to be eternally told things he must accept [...]

The tutor is not a teacher in the usual sense: it is not his job to convey information. The student should find for himself the information. The teacher acts as constructive critic, helping him to sort it out, to try it out sometimes, in the sense of exploring a possible avenue, rejecting one approach in favour of another. The whole process turns around the concept of bias: how you see things, how you evaluate evidence, how you tend to connect one fact with another. The student soon learns the teacher's mind, that a certain teacher tends to apply certain criteria or to favour certain types of evidence. From this point onwards the good student will acquire independence of his teacher, will grope after his own means of interpretation. The good teacher will thus help the student to refute or correct him, which is to say that he will teach method rather than hard and fast conclusions. The great temptation of the teacher is to cling to particular interpretations of evidence. It is hard for us to learn that our students may find their feet in using our methods to reject our views.

Here I think we touch the nerve of power of the tutorial as a tool of learning. Each side is free to refuse what is offered by the other. This may (and does) mean waste of time and effort, boredom and sense of frustration, on both sides." (p18)

Moore sums it all up as follows:

"Here, I suggest, are the roots of the tutorial method. It is a sceptical method, a method that inquires, probes, scrutinises. It is not at its best in ex cathedra authoritative statement, but in criticism, theory, analysis, comparison. It prefers the relative to the absolute, the tentative to the dogmatic, the essay to the treatise. Obviously—and this we must consider later—it is antagonistic to much in the modern temper and does not offer that certainty which the young so often and so naturally seek. A university in which the tutorial method operates is not likely to offer a blueprint for society, to speak with the voice of authority, to fix, determine, assert, sanction, denounce. It is rather a university seeking to be the one place in society where inquiry may proceed without regard to the consequences, where theory may clash with theory, to be the home of point and counterpoint, of dialectic rather then of dogma." (pp 31/32)

Finally, Moore ends his little book by quoting a colleague (Dr Marjorie Reeves, Vice-Principal of St Anne's College, giving evidence to the Franks Commission):

'When every effort has been made to make instruction effective [...] it is still true that there is no substitute for the individual tutorial, either singly or in pairs. Its function is not to instruct: it is to set the student the task of expressing his thought articulately, and then to assist him in subjecting his creation to critical examination and reconstructing it. The charge of spoon-feeding so often levelled against the tutorial method implies a complete misunderstanding of its function: it should be the most adult relationship between teacher and student, not the least [...] Unless all [other teaching methods] lead towards tutorial work, the final and essential stage in education may never be reached. This is the process of handling material for oneself and of bringing together one's own analysis, reflection, judgement in a form which is really a creation of individual thought. No one will dispute that this is the crown of the educational process. What is not so fully accepted is that the very production of an essay by a student demands that it should be subjected to detailed, individual criticism, otherwise his educators have failed him at the last.' (pp 65/66)