Student comments - not about me

I started a new admin job last week in the Education Faculty at the other University here in the City where the Castle is also a Prison. It's three days a week, and should take care of my bills over the summer, which is a relief.

As part of this, I minuted a staff-student consultative meeting this week. It's very interesting to hear what students think about courses in a department where you don't do any teaching, and see how different departments run. This is one in which a lot of the teaching is practical stuff, rather than book based - I'm used to consultative meetings in which all of the students on all of the courses complain about having too much reading to do. In fact, my Women's Writing students at the same University have complained about this to me (more on this another day). But, as an informed observer - I have some thoughts on how seminars work from both a student and tutor perspective - some of the students' complaints revealed much more about students' 'faulty' expectations than about the tutors. For example:

"Our tutor didn't know enough about his subject to teach us anything. When he asked a question and it stayed quiet he just kept waiting for someone to answer rather than telling us the answer himself. And sometimes, when he had us doing group work, when one group asked a question, he asked the other group if they could answer it. He was waiting for us to tell each other because he didn't know the answer himself."

Now to me, waiting for students to answer rather than answering your own question immediately, and having them think for themselves and discuss with each other rather than treating the tutor as a teacher, seems to me like very good tutorial practice, and something I try to implement in my own seminars. They are not the place for me to give the students information - that happens in lectures. But what I found really odd was that the Chair of the meeting did not attempt to address this complaint. He just moved on and left the accusation of not knowing enough about the topic to linger over the head of the absent part time tutor. And I wanted to interject. But I was not wearing my academic hat to the meeting, so I had to just write down what was said and leave it alone. But it does emphasise that students expect university to be like school: that they will be spoon-fed information and won't have to do any independent thinking or group work. What worries me is that these were second year students. I don't know why this idea wasn't shaken out of them in their first year, but it should have been. And the course co-ordinator ought to have put them right at this meeting too, otherwise the same sort of complaints and expectations will continue.

So, for the record: your tutor may well know what he is talking about. He may also know what he is doing in running his seminars like that. You have to do some independent thinking. At least some of the time...