On Saturday 9 December, I facilitated a session at the Cambridge AL development conference that had the title: Delivering Excellent Correspondence Tuition Quickly: Is It Possible and How Do We Do It?
Here is a shortened version of the abstract that described the event:
Correspondence tuition takes a lot of time. Delivering excellent correspondence tuition is both an art and a challenge, but how can we try to deliver excellent correspondence quickly? This session is all about sharing experiences and uncovering correspondence tuition techniques to make things easier for ourselves. If you are a new tutor and would like to learn some useful tips and techniques, then do come along! If you are an experienced tutor and would like to share your experience with others, you will be especially welcome too! You will hopefully come away with an armoury of techniques that you can apply with your next TMA. An outcome of the session will be a useful resource that will be shared to everyone after the AL conference.
In some respects, this session trying to do two very important and seemingly opposing things: how to do excellent teaching as quickly as possible. I chose ‘speed’ as a focus since as a tutor I know how much time goes into preparing good correspondence tuition.
This blog post is intended to share a set of points that were created during the session; it is intended to the ‘that useful resource’ that might be useful for tutors.
Excellent correspondence tuition
- TMA feedback should be, of course, useful!
- Correspondence tuition should help students to move forward and to guide students towards improvements in their performance (and understanding)
- Feedback should also guide students towards the next step of their studies.
- Importantly, feedback should acknowledge what has been done well.
- Correspondence tuition should include examples, potentially provide a concrete goal which students could aim for, it should be motivating and treat the student as a person.
- Comments on a TMA should provide explanations for the mark that has been given and also link back to learning outcomes that have been defined within a module; comments should have a purpose.
- The tone that is used should be personal, conversational, engage with what a student has written and submitted, and offer encouragement.
- It should help students to learn by broadening out or extending the context by applying existing knowledge.
- For some modules, encourage students to use diagrams (which can be a way to efficiently share an understanding of key module concepts); some modules encourage the use of tables.
- Enhance understanding of module materials by encouraging students to think about how module concepts relate to their own lives and their work.
- Present feedforward (student guidance) in small increments; consider limiting advice to three things that can be improved or worked on.
- When faced with a challenging TMA, suggest one thing that a student should continue to do for the next TMA.
- Refer to forthcoming TMAs in the current TMA to show how assessments can be connected.
- Refer student to skills for study website and other pages that might be helpful on their student home page.
Marking strategies
- Take time to read through the tutor notes.
- From a practical perspective, make sure that you have access to lots of tea.
- Read through past TMAs as a guide.
- Consider looking through all TMAs briefly to get an idea of the submissions.
- Mark a good TMA first to build up confidence and understanding.
- Return to students in batches and set student expectations in terms of when marks will be returned.
Biggest tips
Towards the end of the session, I asked everyone to share their biggest tips to a new tutor. This is (roughly) what everyone said:
- Prepare a comment template which you can heavily customise for the needs of individual students.
- Don’t agonise over individual marks, i.e. ‘should this get 3 marks or 4 marks?’; choose a mark (using your gut instinct, as informed by your knowledge of the module materials) and move on (since there are lots of marks to allocate!
- Be friendly and approachable!
- Don’t get into the trap of spending 3 hours to mark every TMA; there lies madness.
- Use a timer to see how long you’re spending on each script.
- Focus on three things that can be improved or developed.
- Highlight important parts of scripts using green/yellow highlights.
- Make sure that you spellcheck the PT3 summary.
- Ask your mentor for advice.
- Draw on a bank of handouts; sections can be copied into a script to provide feedback, or additional documents can be returned through the ETMA system.
- Consider using a spreadsheet to keep track of student marks and your interaction with students.
- Provide an action plan for students and offer a summary.
- Print out a copy of the tutor notes so you have it to hand (and add your own comments to it!)
- Provide references to the Good Study Guide book.
- Ensure that correspondence tuition is always personalised to the needs of individual students.