Robert J. Beck
Department of Education
Lawrence University
The purpose of this conference is to share practices in tutorial education, but I assume that we do not propose to adopt each other's approaches whole cloth. A tutorial system such as Oxford’s, which I will examine, is the product of a long cultural tradition and cannot easily be transferred. Perhaps, this is why American colleges have long sent their students for junior years abroad to experience the Oxford education at its home site. If liberal arts colleges, such as those represented here, wish to profit from the Oxford approach, they need to know the theory behind the practice in order to best adapt it to their academic purposes.
Yet, our admiration for the Oxford tutorial rests on belief only, in “its glories,” as Richard Dawkins put it, not hard evidence. Other than historical analyses and anecdotal practitioner accounts that have identified general objectives and procedures, there is neither a formal pedagogic theory of the tutorial, nor, consequently, any explanations as to why it has endured so long, and in the eyes of the 30 Oxford Fellows and Tutors of my study, why it is still successful. Because of the many variations of the tutorial, its conduct in private settings, its cultural uniqueness, and lack of systematic studies, the problem of researching the theory behind the practice is a matter of some difficulty. It is also an urgent problem, because recent reports have sounded the alarm that the Oxford tutorial may possibly be endangered or at least with alteration beyond recognition. Claims for the so-called “Jewel in the Crown” are in need of empirical investigation, but without a model of its pedagogy it would be fruitless to study the tutorial.
How does the traditional tutorial work and what is its principal objective? In a general sense the tutorial is all about learning a discipline or group of related disciplines primarily through writing and discussion. As one researcher, Paul Ashwin, summarized recently: “The ‘Oxford Tutorial’ is part of a learning system that involves a period, usually a week, of intensive study, the preparation of some work, whether an essay [albeit a brief and concise 4-6 pages in response to a question set usually but not always by the don] or in the sciences or engineering the completion of a problem sheet, followed by the tutorial itself. Students usually have three tutorials a fortnight…” (2005, p. 632). Given four fortnights a term and three terms a year, this adds up to a staggering 36, but as many as 48 essays in the first year of a History Honors Program, for example and another 32 essays during years 2 and 3, or a total of 80 short essays plus a 15,000 word thesis, in a three-year undergraduate career. Although these numbers vary by discipline and degree program, the amount of writing required is substantial. As Gavin Williams, our colleague on this panel, has so aptly stated: in tutorials students do the work. In this presentation I will refer primarily to work in the humanities.
Students, increasingly two or more, bring their essays to one-hour or more sessions with their tutors who are Fellows in the particular subject students are said to be reading at their college. The two other essential features of the tutorial, the first unfortunately in steep decline, are that students initially “read out” their essays or give mini-lectures summarizing their papers from notes and then, or folded into the reading, there ensues a discussion. Henry Mayr-Harting, a Regius Professor Emeritus at Christ Church College, who lectured at Lawrence on the Oxford tutorial earlier in this academic year, put it simply: no essay no tutorial! While the discussion may wander away into other dimensions of the discipline under consideration, and the focus may address the form of the student’s argument in answering the question that has been set, the essay forms the core subject matter of the instruction in that hour.
What do Oxford educators expect their students to learn by this method?
Teach Students to Think for Themselves: the Development of Metacognitive Powers
The goals of tutorial education have generally been to teach students to think for themselves and to have confidence in their own conclusions and opinions. And tutorials are held to develop students’ facilities to express themselves in writing, or other means of presentation. Other related pedagogical objectives are found in Moore (1968), who stated that the purpose of tutorials is not to instruct or convey information to the student so much as to induce students to actively consider ways to evaluate evidence and make connections among diverse pieces of evidence. It is a skeptical method using initial inquiry, criticism, theory analysis and comparison.
While Moore's observations begin to differentiate the objective of teaching students to think for themselves, my project in this talk is to fully problematize the concept by inquiring into the nature of the Oxford education and, specifically, to connect the procedures of the tutorial to the development of student metacognitive powers. Metacognitive powers refer to the development of a student’s so-called executive or active control in thinking or reasoning about thinking and thinking about how one learns (Flavell, 1979). Metacognition entails strategies for planning, monitoring and evaluating progress toward learning goals. Such techniques as self-questioning and self-assessment are considered vital to the development of students’ ability to engage in higher-order thinking and self-regulated learning (Brown, 1987). All these are dimensions of “thinking for oneself.”
I intend to argue that the Oxford tutorial not only systematically trains metacognitive powers, but the process does not require explicit heuristics and injunctions to think for oneself. Philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn (1962) said: “that to be literate one needed to know the words, but also to participate in the discourse of a textual community," "and that implies knowing which texts are important, how they are to be read and interpreted, and how they are applied in talk and action" (Schwarz & Glassner, 2003). In fact, the Oxford tutorial is a natural, cultural practice that relies on an extensively repeated chain of literacy-enhancing activities to support students’ metacognitive powers within the context of disciplinary mastery. How far seeing were the developers of this practice some 100 years before the discovery of metacognition in pedagogic theory!
Writing: “The Improvable Object”
In the development of a student’s literacy, writing is both a means and an end. As preparation for the tutorial, student work during the week not only consists of writing, whether these are notes on lectures or from books, but above all in the composition of a written essay, without which a meeting with one’s tutor would be fruitless: no essay, no tutorial. Writing occupies a privileged role in expressing and developing the ability to think for oneself.
In writing, a student accesses the deepest levels of learning to think. Alan Ryan holds that students use their writing to understand what they know: “knowing that he will not know what he thinks until he sees what he has written” (p. 79).
Max van Mannen, a philosopher of writing, elaborates this idea: “Writing teaches us what we know, and in what way we know what we know. As we commit ourselves to paper we see ourselves mirrored in this text. Now the text confronts us…Research is writing in that it places consciousness in the position of confronting itself….to write is to exercise self-consciousness” (1990, p.127, 129).
University of Toronto literacy theorist David Olson puts it this way: “Because writing creates representations of thought, that are more precise and reliable than oral discourse, such as concepts, evidence, and arguments, it allows these forms to become self-consciously the object of further reflection, analysis and design (p. 266) and affords further discourse” (p. 51). Sartre points out that writing entails rewriting in which there is a construction of successive or multiple layers of meaning, a process he compares to the creation of an art object (van Mannen, 1990).
Because it is reviewable, and rewritable, writing therefore affords multiple metacognitive perspectives to a learner, who can track the development of her thinking. Writing is thus the unique pathway to attain the ability to think for oneself. Not only is writing, arguably, the supreme method of communicating thought, but it also lays down a record of thought’s progress, and so facilitates the assessment of a student’s development in thinking for herself. Just as writing enables a tutor to assess a student’s thinking, it also enables the student to achieve metacognitive awareness of her own thought as it develops.
According to Gordon Wells (2001), Marlene Scardamalia, Carl Bereiter, and Mary Lamon (1994), all faculty at one time in the Ontario Institute for the Study of Education (OISE), University of Toronto, knowledge building requires an “improvable object” as the focus of the activity. The improvable object may be orally communicated ideas or an artifact, such as an essay prepared for a tutorial. The goal is to transform the “object.” Marjorie Reeve’s observation in this regard is apt: “it is to set the student the task of expressing his thought articulately, and then to assist him in subjecting his creation to critical examination and reconstructing it” (cited in Palfreyman, 2000, 7).
I think that any scientific model of tutorial pedagogy will inevitably require concepts and methods that provide evidence of the serial transformation of student essays.
Presenting the Essay
After the essay is written, the student brings her paper to the tutorial session. Neither contemporary students nor faculty much care for the idea that students should present their essays prior to tutorial discussion. “It takes too long” and “I already have a written record” are two comments often heard. But, I want to argue for an oral presentation, although I agree with Elizabeth Frazer, a Fellow in Politics at New College, that the student should limit his remarks to five or so main points in the argument and that it should be delivered from notes, not read literally from the written essay. Why is oral presentation needed? As Mayr-Harting says: “Out of their lips rather than the tutor’s must come what needs to be said” (p. 6). Tutors do not always read the paper beforehand, and may have only the student’s presentation as a basis for their response.
As Kuhn suggested, oral presentation is part of the essential discourse of the intellectual community into which the student is being socialized and integrated. When students present their essays to the tutor they are acting/performing their argument, as if they are teachers lecturing from a prepared script. Knowing they will have to teach, and have to teach a rather knowledgeable audience in the tutor, particularly, students recognize they will have to be knowledgeable, as knowledgeable as a teacher. In this role, the students learn that in their presentations teachers must be prepared to justify and defend their propositions and their supporting evidence. In playing the role of teacher, who is ostensibly someone who can think for himself, so students learn to think for themselves.
Curiously, while affecting disdain for the oral presentation, perhaps because reading the essay doesn't always feel like teaching, both students and tutors seem to agree that it is useful for peers to teach each other. “There is nothing like trying to explain material to someone else to find out what you really understand!” wrote Penny Probert, a Fellow in Engineering at Lady Margaret Hall (p. 69).
David Olson (1994) supports oral presentation for other reasons: “Writing has difficulty communicating prosodic features, such as rising intonation, volume, voice quality, and ironic tone.” Such prosodic features communicate intentions such as “sincerity, seriousness, and commitment [that] are poorly represented in script” (266). But when students present their own essays orally, some of these problems are circumvented. The strength of the student's declarations, sincerity and commitment in their arguments are more apparent when their written essay is combined with an oral presentation. Exposed to his pupil’s confidence in his spoken ideas, the tutor may better question or confront his argument and later, be better prepared to criticize the adequacy of the essay. Doing it in person, adds Robin Lane Fox, a Fellow in History at New College, may also reveal the level of confidence the pupil has in his argument and perhaps to what degree he understands his own or, perhaps appropriated, argument. To this latter point, Martin Ceadel, a Fellow in Politics at New College, adds that an oral reading enables the tutor to detect parroting, where students are speaking too literally the ideas of the authors they are conveying.
And, as the student orally communicates the essay, as we all have seen as we attempt to speak what we know, such shortfalls in meaning or confidence may also arise in his own self-consciousness: to what extent does he really know what he is talking about?
Tutorial Discussion: Teaching students to develop mental flexibility
How does the tutorial discussion carry on the work of the student presentation? To reiterate, Henry Mayr-Harting (2006) strongly argued that the tutorial is first and foremost a discussion of the student’s own work. The function of tutorials, he says “…is to turn out people who can survive and adapt to rapid change, who can bend their mental powers to new fronts as they emerge” (p. 4). I suggest that the tutorial discussion, particularly, provides a compact linguistic context of rapid intellectual exchange for training "mental flexibility". As students present their claims, they receive and participate in an insistent, fast-paced dialogical stream of tutor questions, alternative formulations, and feedback, that is, new emerging fronts in Mayr-Harting's terminology to which they must adapt flexibly, either in defending or adapting these incoming ideas to their developing thesis or realizing that their argument is failing and there is a need to start over. In the process their mental powers are bent - - to ponder and to answer the directions pointed to by the tutors’ communications - - and to re-compose their positions in response to criticism.
It might be claimed that in hearing himself talk under such conditions, or in hearing the tutor represent his argument, a student discovers what he thinks, just as his writing serves a comparable function.
Supporting student self questioning and self-critique through tutor interrogation and Socratic questioning
There is a persistent image of the Oxford tutor as Socratic. Perhaps, it is because Benjamin Jowitt, the famous classicist at Balliol College in the 1880s is associated with the origins of the questioning form of the Oxford tutorial, just as he taught Plato’s dialogues as content. In observing Oxford tutorials I have confirmed Alan Ryan’s claim that the tutor teaches largely through questioning. "…[M]ake it clear that students teach themselves and that the tutor’s task is to interrogate them in such a way as to discover how well they have taught themselves and in that way help them build up their ability to teach themselves" (p. 80). Thus questioning serves both a formative assessment function and as an aid that points students in directions they have hitherto not considered. In this latter sense the tutor is helping to build an architecture of the primary question or problem of the essay. But the tutor tends not to build the architecture by telling, so much as by probing or asking, once again encouraging the student to do the work.
While the indirect style of questioning serves to reduce the tutor’s function in conveying direct instruction and, hence, supports the student’s more equitable, self-teacher role, the sequence of questions may have other pedagogic intentions “…the object of the encounter is that the student should teach himself by understanding how to emerge from a spider’s web of questions" says Ryan, “If you think that, then what do you want to say about…?” (p. 80). In other words, questioning functions to point to parts of the argument that may be inconsistent or misunderstood.
In support of this point, Robin Lane Fox (2001) places the use of questioning in tutorials in Socratic perspective. Lane Fox’s own first tutor based his approach on the early Socratic dialogues in which Socrates “leads his young pupil obliquely by questions until the pupil’s confusions and contradictions are exposed and the working definition [of central concepts in life, such as justice] turns out to be unworkable” (p. 54). “Socrates tends to focus on one pupil at a time, taking him individually through a path which exposes his mistakes” (p. 54). We will assume that Ryan’s “web of questions” was intended to communicate the same idea: that the young student catches himself in a web of answers of his own making, the web having been stimulated by the probes of the more experienced “spider-tutor”. The student is led through a ritual of self-criticism that undermines his argument and at the moment the error is realized, he or she will experience it emotionally, just as it is intellectually transforming. Of course, not all tutors will be skilled in, or choose to use, this questioning strategy.
Student responses to tutor questions also provide material for evaluation and other forms of feedback. Richard Mash, a Fellow in Economics at New College, proposes that tutorials are exceptional settings for providing extensive feedback: “Tutorials should offer excellent opportunities for feedback that is positive (while always being honest), and the frequency of feedback should help the process whereby students settle in mentally and feel that, subject to the required effort, they can be successful” (p. 91). Emma Smith, a Fellow in English at Hertford College, described her role in the tutorial as less of a teacher than as a critic. Mayr-Harting offered some excellent advice about criticism and feedback on students’ essays: “A pupil needs to hear why the tutor thinks it is a good essay…to understand what makes a good piece of work a good piece of work”; even for weak essays, the tutor should “build up the credit column all he or she can before going into the debit column” (p. 5).
I think I should point out here that there is an extreme aversion among the Oxford tutors in my study to provide letter grade evaluations to essays. While formative feedback, nuanced notes and other annotations are used copiously, there was no tendency to grade essays, which is regarded as inhibiting motivation. Why? Perhaps, because grading violates the open-ended quality of the tutorial and suggests a sense of finality or, at least, may be taken that way.
Developing students’ abilities to argue
But what does it mean to be literate with respect to the activities of reading, listening, writing, presenting, and discussing as they lead toward the development of competency in writing? Israeli pedagogical researchers Baruch Schwarz and Amron Glassner (2003) suggest that it means to master argumentation. In a recent study, Duna Sabri, a Fellow in Education at Harris-Manchester College, and colleagues (2007) interviewed 12 Oxford tutors and 36 students on their experiences of the marking or formative assessment of essays in history and archeology. Both tutors and students agreed that the assessments were largely concerned with the improvement of students' arguments:
"Tutors initial responses to the question about criteria for what makes a good essay was [p]rimarily [that] they are looking for an argument that consistently addresses the question. They define good essays in generic ways as incisive, precise, concise, critically evaluating arguments, containing personal interpretation and demonstrating independence of mind" (p. 12).
I recall here a quote by a student in Brasenose College Fellow James Clark’s (2000) study of student evaluations of tutorials: “they’ll teach you to argue about anything [in tutorials] but not how to pass examinations.
The purpose of the ensemble of tutorial literacy activities, therefore, is to improve students' command of argumentation in specific disciplinary domains of knowledge and that thinking for oneself is trained, and assessed ultimately, as learning to make a good argument. From a metacognitive perspective, it means that students develop a keen understanding of the structure of arguments.
Argumentation ensues when there is communication about "an issue that has two sides and which provides for two opposing communicator roles: a protagonist who puts forward a claim and an antagonist who doubts that claim, contradicts it, or otherwise withholds assent” (van Eemeren, Grootendorst, Jackson & Jacobs, 1997, 209). Aristotle theorized that the objective of argumentation, which was located in the dialectic of critical discussion and inquiry, was to "expose error in thinking and to shape discourse toward a rational ideal” (p. 210). Socratic dialogues are the most well known examples of argumentation through questioning in critical discussions. We need not limit the use of argumentation in the Oxford tutorial to this formal analysis, but can accept that during the tutorial discussion the process uses questioning, responses, and feedback to expose errors, contradictions, and fallacies in student thinking.
In the tutorial dialogue about the student's argument, I have observed a process of "conversational repair" that is common to other forms of everyday and specialized linguistic interactions in which meaning is negotiated. Conversational repair is needed in all conversations because we cannot communicate everything we intend during our particular turns in conversations. Meanings may be unclear for several reasons: because the speakers express themselves poorly, or their messages may be misinterpreted, and either party’s meanings may be incomplete or erroneous. In his analysis of classroom interaction, McHoul (1990) found that teachers guided students through the process of repairs in small steps through cluing: hinting at the correction until students come up with answers on their own (cited in Liebscher & Daily-O'Cain, 2003). Overwhelmingly, teachers use questions to clue repair and I suggest tutorial dialogues operate similarly.
When a tutor asks a question about some claim within a student's essay or presentation, he or she is requesting information from the student, but the intent may also range from uncertainty, to doubt, and even outright dispute and opposition. While the phrasing of the question may be subtle, relatively non-specific, and indirect ("what are you getting at here?) or direct and specific (why do you claim that economic factors alone led to WWII?) or challenging (Aren't you dead-wrong about this?), in each case the tutor is referring to possible errors in the student's argument. At the very least, the tutor is indicating that more information is needed to answer the question and is offering clues in potentially useful directions. But when the student responds to such questions, the answer may indicate further problems in the student's thinking, and the tutor's subsequent feedback in the next exchange(s) will indicate how adequate the answer was, thus pointing out additional errors; for example, the student may not have understood the question or may have provided answers that are deficient in evidence or a relevant warrant (Toulmin, 1958).
This process is very different than the mindreading and guessing games some teachers employ when they ask: who knows the capital of Wisconsin? Rather, in tutorials questions and feedback are used to induce students to repair their reasoning, although some direct corrections of information are inevitable. In students’ successful repairs, because they are not based simply on the tutor's better answer, they may, in fact, demonstrate the kind of self-understanding that would lead an observer to conclude that the student was able to think for himself. And, consider that in a tutorial discussion, in the hands of a skillful tutor, there is the potential for many, perhaps dozens of such exchanges that proceed successively to identify finer and finer points of error and self-correction. While the tutor’s written marks on a student's essay may play an important role in correcting the essay, this is greatly enhanced by the complexity of the tutorial communications that provide such nuanced and contingent feedback. In fact, on close examination of this process, I have observed that the tutorial hour involves an almost continuous formative assessment of students' arguments that result in the identification of many points of error, some of which may be repaired successfully by students. And, in this process, contrary to argumentation theory, the object is not explicit agreement between tutor and student, but to induce the student to make his own repairs to his argument and thus, to learn to think for himself. In the next stage of my research I will need close analyses of actual tutorial dialogues to flesh out these live observations.
How does the Oxford approach to training argument measure up? Schwarz and Glassner (2003) reviewed empirical research on the effectiveness of argumentation-learning activities. Two of the successful principles they analyzed are most relevant to the Oxford tutorial: (1) a chaining or series of different literacy activities around the same theme; (2) the chaining should involve an alternation of individual synthetic and dialectical interactive activities.
At Oxford, there is an elegant, transformative chain of literacy activities involving: written notes taken from texts, lectures and classes, and perhaps dialectical discussions with peers in a residential setting, become the written essay, an individual synthetic activity. The argument of the essay is then transformed by the oral presentation, another synthetic activity; the argument of oral presentation is then transformed through dialectical discussion with peers and tutors during the tutorial; if the student then revises her essay, this would comprise a concluding synthetic transformation.
In summary, the Oxford tutorial satisfies every requirement of a metacognitive and high-end literacy education, not only teaching students to think independently but self-consciously. The various activities, a prodigious amount of reading and writing, the routine assumption of the teacher role, and engagement in critical dialogues that induce repeated self-questioning, self-correction, and mental flexibility – all involve the exercise of self-conscious thinking. It is not only each essay that is improved, and writing in general, but across many essays, the mental object that is improved is student competence in argument itself. Through the rhythm of reading and research, writing and presentation, discussion and collaborative repair and reformulation of their arguments, gently and indirectly, week after week, term after term, year after year, it is not surprising that most Oxford students will in the end learn to think for themselves.
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