Personal Tutoring Strategies and Tips Toolbox

The role of the Manchester Met personal tutor is to work with tutees to support them in progressing through their time at university. Activities will come under three categories we call the 3Cs. These are: 

• Course: Course focused support for academic progress.
• Community: Community building through encouraging participation in a learning community and signposting to support services when required.
• Career: Career planning support towards an identified career path.

Here are some suggestions for activities that will tend to happen in each year of an undergraduate degree:

Year one

Year two

Year Abroad or Work Placement

Final Year

Post-graduation

Coaching techniques take a non-directive approach to personal tutoring meetings, that focus on the student and aim to support them to identify their own goals and issues and develop strategies and solutions. In this way, the tutor’s role is to ask questions to raise awareness, summarise, reflect back what a student has said, and in doing this, to try to use the same language as the student. Two simple coaching models are presented below. Both work with the idea that anyone can be trained to solve their own problems to some extent.

COACHING STYLES

The text below shows styles moving downwards from non-directive to directive:

Helping someone solve their own problems (Non-Directive Pull Style)

• Listening to understand
• Reflecting
• Paraphrasing
• Summarising
• Asking questions that raise awareness
• Making suggestions
• Giving feedback
• Offering guidance
• Giving advice
• Instructing
• Telling

Solving someone’s problem for them (Directive Push Style)

Using a coaching model always involves:

• Active Listening - this involves attention to body language, and other skills of communication. See this article Become a Better Listener on the PsychCentral website.

• Open Questioning - using questions that do not simply prompt the answer ‘Yes’ or ‘No’. For example asking ‘How are you preparing for the exams?’ rather than ‘Are exams something you like?’

• One of the least useful questions to ask can be ’How’s it going?’ – because we tend to answer ‘Fine’ whether this is true or not. Try to ask open questions that are specific.

COACHING MODELS

The GROW model has been widely used and although there are much more complex models of coaching, this very simple model provides a good starting point to shape a proactive tutorial.

For instance, asking the student about their goals (which could be long term or short term):

Goal: E.g. How do you think you will get on with the module in analytical chemistry this year? This could open up into a discussion about whether the student is concerned about their level of mathematical ability, or other concerns about the topic. Or it could lead to reflection on their level of attendance on the unit due to their commitments to earn money outside of the university.

Reality: E.g. How do you manage to fit your work commitments around your course? The student might talk about their work patterns changing or that they have been asked to lead a team or that late night shifts make attending classes early in the day difficult for them.

Options: E.g. What other ways could you access course materials to catch up on sessions you miss? What other sources of funding could you access? Are there periods of time when you could work more intensively on your course / in paid employment to free you up for the exam period (etc)?

Way Forward: What do you think you will do before we next meet?

Try to encourage students to set SMART goals:

• Specific
• Measureable
• Action-oriented
• Realistic
• Time-constrained

The CIGAR model is a variation of the GROW model:

• Current situation
• Ideal outcome
• Gap between C and I
• Action plan
• Review

This model also enables a student to set goals and actions but specifically includes the idea of review at the next meeting. It also implies analysis of the gap between goals and realities.

These are meetings that are timetabled or tutor-initiated at each level for every student and have clear purposes and sometimes, specific content. In many cases, these kinds of meetings will be designed to align with the PDP activity in the department.

The first meeting may typically include:

• a general welcome and orientation; if this is 2nd or 3rd year UG then this might be a link meeting to last year’s performance – perhaps considering exam results or final level marks.

• basic boundary setting.

• explanation of the goals of Academic Tutorials in the department.

• the role and responsibilities of the tutor.

• setting and agreeing expectations and responsibilities of the student.

Subsequent meetings could focus on:

• feedback from work submitted - how does the student think they did? How would s/he have assessed their performance?

• option choice for the next level - linking this to career goals if appropriate.

• PDP including, for example, a personal SWOT analysis or some thinking around work experiences they have enjoyed/not enjoyed.

• In some cases, the tutorials may also be used for formal Personal Development Planning within a department’s own scheme.

The final meeting of the level will include discussion of achievement at the level completed and transition to the next level. When deciding on the content or structure of the final meeting in a level, it may be useful to consider how transition to the following year is supported and to develop activity around this. For example, an end of year ‘report’ or reflection by the student could be used to discuss progress towards objectives and goal setting for the period to come. The student may want to discuss what their major achievements are and how they might record these for employability purposes.

These occur when a student has an unexpected issue that may impact on their academic performance and that they therefore need to discuss with an academic tutor. They will often involve advising a student how to make an application for exceptional factors, how to make sense of marks received that may not be what was hoped for or to communicate more complex needs around health or welfare issues that affect academic performance. These meetings are almost always student-initiated and their content often unpredictable. As well as the coaching model, an adaptive guidance model can also be helpful in this situation.

As these may arise at any time, it is necessary to discuss the possibilities for these meetings to occur during the boundary setting that forms part of the first proactive meeting:

If a student needs to come and see you for any reason, when are your office hours? Can a student come to you outside of these times? How should they do this? (arrange by email or other method?) what if they have a sudden crisis?

In some cases, you may need to refer them to other services. It is helpful to explain that this is not because you don’t want to help them, but because sometimes other professionals are better placed to deal with some issues than you are. You are not abandoning them, merely seeking to signpost them to the best possible help.

The expectation on you as a personal tutor to provide some kind of pastoral care to your student tutees, will vary to a large extent depending on your discipline area. For example, students in healthcare (e.g. Nursing) may need very different levels of personal and pastoral support as they learn to deal with, for example, patients’ end of life care issues, than students studying in other areas. Nonetheless, many students do experience their own significant life events during their time at university and may need help in finding a ways to cope.

Of course, many students may not wish to involve a tutor, but where the student has sought help the role of the academic tutor is usually to:

• provide a sounding board for issues that the student has brought.

• advise on the effects of these issues on attendance, assessment, and academic performance.

• refer the student to the most relevant sources of help as appropriate.

How Do You Think of Your Students?

Consider how this changes our perceptions - if we think of our students as “future colleagues”, for example, what implications does that have for the way we interact with students in tutorial settings? See the quote above for ways that tutors may think of their students.

How Do Students See the Tutor-Student Relationship?

The nominations for the category of Best Personal Tutor at the MMU Student Awards for teaching staff were analysed to provide these figures.