Earlier this year, I tried a new approach in my Professional Ethics class. I start the class by introducing a concept that is relevant to the students’ professional development in the context of our ethics module. I link the concept to something current and relevant that we could anchor the weeks topic to. For example, in one of our sessions we used the #RhodesMustFall campaign to anchor a discussion on history, race and power, and how these issues are still relevant in daily professional practice.
After we’ve spent about 15-20 minutes introducing and discussing the topic at the overview level, the students get into small groups of 3-5 and discuss how these concepts are relevant in their own practices and experiences as physiotherapy students in the health system. While they talk in their groups, I try to facilitate each discussion by adding additional comments and insights, often based on my own experiences and readings.
At the end of the session I give the students an assignment, due at our next session, usually a week later. While this assignment is most often a written piece of work, this year I also experimented with PhotoVoice (examples here and here) as an option for student submissions. There is almost always a peer feedback component included in the weekly assignment, whereby each student must give and receive feedback on their work, using the feedback to improve their submission. I then conduct a formative assessment of each student’s work, providing feedback for them to continue improving the work.
Immediately after the lesson I write up a summary of the session, adding a list of reading resources and often also providing guidance on things that I think would be useful for the students. This often includes additional reading on developing research questions, framing a question for online searches, filtering resources, writing, given and receiving feedback, etc. I think that these kinds of skills are essential for almost all the academic work that any literate person in the 21st century needs. I then share the summary with students via Google Drive, which creates a nice overview of the topics, discussion covered in class, and prompts for further exploration.
Each term we cover a major topic (e.g. professional development, ethical decision making, social justice, etc.), with the weekly topics providing background and context related to personal experiences within those topics. At the end of the year, the students combine all of their writing, reading, feedback, reflections, clinical experiences, etc. and submit a final portfolio of learning over the course of the year.
Which brings me to the title of this post. A few days ago I came across Oxford tutorials while reading An appetite for wonder, the first in a two part biography of Richard Dawkins. I had thought that my lessons described above with my ethics students were quite innovative until I read up a little bit more on the Oxford tutorial system. The basic premise is that undergraduate students are assigned tutors from their college (which is different to their disciplinary department), who guide them through a variety of weekly assignments that are intensive and academically rigorous.
The tutor meets with the students in small groups (2-3) on a weekly basis and assigns them a series of readings based on a topic. The students must prepare a written assignment for the following week, in which they explore the assigned topic in depth and prepare to present and substantiate their ideas to their peers. The process seems so intense that I get the impression that the work is more like a mini-thesis than a short essay.
This essentially means that the work that the students do is not simply a summary of the topic content. Students must cover the concepts in incredible depth (some critics say that the reading requirement alone means that the topics cannot be covered in any real depth), exploring the philosophical implications of the work, prepare for critique, present controversial ideas and defend them.
There are some limitations of the format, not least of which is that it is time-consuming and resource intensive. In addition, there are other critiques of the tutorial system, including that it doesn’t adequately prepare students for the world of work. However, the stated pedagogical aim of trying to help students learn how to think, together with a process that does seem aligned with this goal, seems to me to be reason enough to explore some aspects of the approach for my ethics module.
Over the next few weeks I will spend some time getting to grips with the Oxford Tutorial and incorporating some of its ideas into my teaching practice, as a way of helping my students develop their thinking and reasoning skills. More on this to come.