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500 Tips For Tutors
This book presents over 500 practical suggestions designed to help tutors establish active learning amongst their students. Divided into useful sections the tips cover the entire range of teaching and learning situations and comprise a 'start anywhere', dip-in resource suitable for both the newcomer and the old hand. Intended mainly for the university or college lecturer involved in learner-centred learning, this resource offers fresh ideas and food for thought on six broad areas of the This lively and stimulating book will prove invaluable to lecturers, tutors, teachers, trainers and staff developers.
144 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 1993
3 people want to read
About the author
Sally Brown
129 books4 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.
Sally Brown has worked in higher education for more than twenty years and was most recently Director of Membership Services at the Institute for Learning and Teaching in Higher Education.
As well as working at Leeds Metropolitan University as Professor of Higher Education Diversity in Learning and Teaching , Professor Brown was Acting Associate Dean at Anglia Polytechnic University and Visiting Professor at the Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen and Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College. She also undertakes consultancy on learning and teaching issues in higher education across the UK and internationally including Australia, New Zealand, US, Canada, Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, Israel, Greece, Singapore and Ireland. She holds a Staff and Educational Development Association (SEDA) Fellowship, is an honorary Life Member of the Hellenic Adult and Distance Learning Association and an ILTHE (now Higher Education Academy) accredited member. She was also founding series editor for the ILTHE Effective Learning series with Kogan Page from 1999 onwards and was founding editor of the ILTHE journal Active Learning in Higher Education, published in conjunction with Sage Publishers.
She is widely published and has edited more than a dozen volumes for Routledge and Kogan Page: her best known publications include Internationalising Higher Education, 2007 Routledge (edited with Elspeth Jones); Towards Inclusive Learning, 2006 Routledge (edited with Mike Adams); Higher Education, 2007 Kogan Page, with Elspeth Jones; Assessing Learners in Higher Education, with Peter Knight, Kogan Page 1994; Strategies for Diversifying Assessment, with Chris Rust and Graham Gibbs, OCSD 1994; Assessment Matters in Higher Education: Choosing and Using Diverse Approaches (edited with Angela Glasner); Open University Press 1999; The Lecturers Toolkit (with Phil Race), Kogan Page 1998 and Lecturing – a Practical Guide (with Phil Race), Kogan Page 2002.
She was founding series editor for Kogan Page series on Staff and Educational Development until July 1999 and edited in that series Internal Audit in Higher Education (with Alison Holmes), Kogan Page 2000; Computer-Aided Assessment (with Phil Race and Joanna Bull), Kogan Page 1999; Benchmarking and Threshold Standards (with Michael Armstrong and Helen Smith), Kogan Page 1999; Facing Up to Radical Change in Universities and Colleges, (with Gail Thompson and Steve Armstrong), Kogan Page 1997; Enabling Student Learning (with Gina Wisker), Kogan Page 1996; Resource Based Learning (with Brenda Smith) Kogan Page July 1996 and Research, Teaching and Learning (with Brenda Smith), Kogan Page 1995.
Sally Brown has worked in higher education for more than twenty years and was most recently Director of Membership Services at the Institute for Learning and Teaching in Higher Education.
As well as working at Leeds Metropolitan University as Professor of Higher Education Diversity in Learning and Teaching , Professor Brown was Acting Associate Dean at Anglia Polytechnic University and Visiting Professor at the Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen and Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College. She also undertakes consultancy on learning and teaching issues in higher education across the UK and internationally including Australia, New Zealand, US, Canada, Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, Israel, Greece, Singapore and Ireland. She holds a Staff and Educational Development Association (SEDA) Fellowship, is an honorary Life Member of the Hellenic Adult and Distance Learning Association and an ILTHE (now Higher Education Academy) accredited member. She was also founding series editor for the ILTHE Effective Learning series with Kogan Page from 1999 onwards and was founding editor of the ILTHE journal Active Learning in Higher Education, published in conjunction with Sage Publishers.
She is widely published and has edited more than a dozen volumes for Routledge and Kogan Page: her best known publications include Internationalising Higher Education, 2007 Routledge (edited with Elspeth Jones); Towards Inclusive Learning, 2006 Routledge (edited with Mike Adams); Higher Education, 2007 Kogan Page, with Elspeth Jones; Assessing Learners in Higher Education, with Peter Knight, Kogan Page 1994; Strategies for Diversifying Assessment, with Chris Rust and Graham Gibbs, OCSD 1994; Assessment Matters in Higher Education: Choosing and Using Diverse Approaches (edited with Angela Glasner); Open University Press 1999; The Lecturers Toolkit (with Phil Race), Kogan Page 1998 and Lecturing – a Practical Guide (with Phil Race), Kogan Page 2002.
She was founding series editor for Kogan Page series on Staff and Educational Development until July 1999 and edited in that series Internal Audit in Higher Education (with Alison Holmes), Kogan Page 2000; Computer-Aided Assessment (with Phil Race and Joanna Bull), Kogan Page 1999; Benchmarking and Threshold Standards (with Michael Armstrong and Helen Smith), Kogan Page 1999; Facing Up to Radical Change in Universities and Colleges, (with Gail Thompson and Steve Armstrong), Kogan Page 1997; Enabling Student Learning (with Gina Wisker), Kogan Page 1996; Resource Based Learning (with Brenda Smith) Kogan Page July 1996 and Research, Teaching and Learning (with Brenda Smith), Kogan Page 1995.
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February 27, 2016
500 Tips for Tutors aims to be a concisely-written book of advice for tutors. The preface states that, while Race and Brown wrote similar books on assessment and lectures, they wanted to specifically target tutors in this book.
Unfortunately, this proved to be more at an SI model of tutoring or for those TA-ing a class. For what's considered a conventional tutoring center (at least in United States' universities), most of these tips were downright useless. Out of 500 of them, I culled maybe 5-10 usable ones. There's a reliance on learning outcomes, which while perfectly common in a classroom, is not so common to be given to tutoring centers. In the index, "learning outcomes" appears on 11 pages. That 8.5% of the book. No joke.
Additionally, this SI model relies on it being one class which the tutor is intimately familiar with, not tutors who have to juggle all the courses offered and rely only on the material the student brings them.
The other problem is that the authors are enamored with group work. It is an excellent way to learn, and I am a huge fan of peer-to-peer learning. That said, it's not feasible the way my tutoring center is set up. At any given point in time, we may have one student from a developmental English class, another from an upper-level, another with a biology paper, and still another studying for history. Peer-to-peer reinforcement works well with people in the same class, or at least those working with the same types of problems, but in an environment where students of all different levels and courses come in at random, there's no way to implement that.
This wouldn't have been so bad if these two aspects didn't take up probably around 85% of the book.
If you work as a TA or an SI, or your tutoring set-up allows these types of models, then you'll probably find some good stuff in here. If your tutoring is set up like a conventional American tutoring center (or you're a private tutor), you should probably give this one a pass.
Popsugar 2016: A book less than 150 pages long
Unfortunately, this proved to be more at an SI model of tutoring or for those TA-ing a class. For what's considered a conventional tutoring center (at least in United States' universities), most of these tips were downright useless. Out of 500 of them, I culled maybe 5-10 usable ones. There's a reliance on learning outcomes, which while perfectly common in a classroom, is not so common to be given to tutoring centers. In the index, "learning outcomes" appears on 11 pages. That 8.5% of the book. No joke.
Additionally, this SI model relies on it being one class which the tutor is intimately familiar with, not tutors who have to juggle all the courses offered and rely only on the material the student brings them.
The other problem is that the authors are enamored with group work. It is an excellent way to learn, and I am a huge fan of peer-to-peer learning. That said, it's not feasible the way my tutoring center is set up. At any given point in time, we may have one student from a developmental English class, another from an upper-level, another with a biology paper, and still another studying for history. Peer-to-peer reinforcement works well with people in the same class, or at least those working with the same types of problems, but in an environment where students of all different levels and courses come in at random, there's no way to implement that.
This wouldn't have been so bad if these two aspects didn't take up probably around 85% of the book.
If you work as a TA or an SI, or your tutoring set-up allows these types of models, then you'll probably find some good stuff in here. If your tutoring is set up like a conventional American tutoring center (or you're a private tutor), you should probably give this one a pass.
Popsugar 2016: A book less than 150 pages long
Displaying 1 of 1 review