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Christopher Douce

Tutorial observation guidelines

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I recently helped to run a session about tutorial observations at a meeting for all the staff tutors from the STEM faculty on 7 November 2017. The purpose of the session was to share practice and to gather information about how different colleagues organise tutorial observations for the OU associate lecturers (ALs) that they help to line manage.

What follows is a summary of a couple of slides that were prepared by my colleague Katherine Leys. Katherine prepared these guidelines as a part of a series of induction sessions for new staff tutors. The guidelines and procedures are, to me, very clear and well thought through, and may be useful for other staff tutors who work across the university (as well as other people in other institutions). For the sake of clarity, I’ve taken the liberty of removing some of institutional jargon and have added a little more description. I hope this post is useful to someone!

Guidelines

  1. An attempt should be made to observe across all appropriate modes of tuition for ALs during their probation period.
  2. ALs should have at least one observation every 4 years and useful feedback should be provided.
  3. Tutor’s lead line managers (LLMs) and tuition task managers (TTMs) should liaise with each other over which observation(s) would be appropriate. The lead line manager will ensure that at least one observation is made before a tutor’s appraisal (CDSA).
  4. An observation report should be stored on a secure server and details added to the tutor’s associate lecturer activity review (ALAR) report.
  5. A lead line manager (LLM) can ask a tuition task manager (TTM) for an observation report (with tutor permission) to prepare for a tutor’s appraisal (CDSA).
  6. A staff tutor should let a tutor’s lead line manager know when an observation has taken place

Suggested procedure

  1. Give ever tutor at least 2 weeks’ notice.
  2. If appropriate, ask tutors to prepare a lesson or a tutorial plan, and have them send it to you.
  3. Use a feedback form to prepare a report (there are various types available).
  4. Ask for reflective feedback from tutor (allow 2 weeks).
  5. Store form and reflection and record details on associate lecturer activity review.
  6. Let a lead line manager know that a visit has been made.

Reflections

After the staff tutor meeting I collected a set of notes from everyone which I now have to write up; it is clear that the subject of tuition observation yielded a lot of discussion. One question that I asked was: is there a willingness to define a standard process for observations? I suspect that the answer for this (when I analyse all my notes) is going to be: ‘no, but guidelines are welcome’.

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