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500 Tips for Tutors
An invaluable source of ideas for college and university teachers to dip into. Topics promoting participation in seminars; making up for others' poor teaching; preparing effective hand-out materials; negotiating learning agreements; assessment; and mentoring.
132 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 1993
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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