Helping students plan their work

Time management may not be listed as such among the graduate attributes that the University has committed itself to fostering, but the capacity to make and carry out timely and effective plans for future activity is clearly implicit in them, and worth fostering explicitly in our teaching – particularly if our teaching assumes a constructivist view of learning, and espouses learning through doing as a philosophical basis.

• Making use of the week 1 tutorial time
• The unit guide / outline
• Planning assignments
• The importance of lead time
• Other resources

Making use of the week 1 tutorial time

In units which are taught by lecture and tutorial or workshop, it is a common practice not to run the tutorial or workshop in the first week of the semester. This is typically justified on the grounds that the first lecture is a broad-brush overview of the subject, and covers the housekeeping details of reading lists, assessment, assignment preparation and submission, staff contact details and consultation times, but no substantive content is introduced which could be the basis for tutorial discussion, nor will students have had time to do enough preparatory reading; some students will not yet have arrived; others may opt in two weeks to change to another unit – and so on.

An alternative view is that, without the pressure to cover a specific range of content within the appointed time, a Week 1 tutorial is an ideal time for tutors

• to start getting to know the students by name
• to give the students an opportunity to start getting to know each other, and in general
• to set the tone for the style of interaction that s/he wants to promote in the remainder of the unit;

and in particular,

• to take the students through the Unit Guide / Outline, and ensure that their attention has been brought to crucial information therein (see below);
• to check the students' comprehension of key points made in the first lecture, and provide an initial opportunity for students to clarify points they are uncertain about; and indeed,
• to give students an early opportunity to engage with the unit and decide if they really want to stay with it.

The unit guide / outline

Why should class time be given to reading the Unit Guide? Isn't it one function of the Unit Guide to obviate the need to sacrifice valuable teaching time to course management issues? Unit Guides at this University vary from subject to subject, but they are typically quite substantial documents, ranging from booklets of around 24 pages to small books of 80 pages or more. Typically their contents include information under at least 5 different headings:

Inevitably, given the nature and the volume of information to be conveyed, the written style of Unit Guides is liable to exhibit compression, ellipsis and conventional terminology (aka jargon), not to mention legalese. While this makes them harder to read, especially to newly-arrived non-native speaker students, a tutor can make it easier for them to follow by taking them through it in class, checking for comprehension difficulties as they go.

Planning assignments

In Chinese school and undergraduate courses the principal assessment activity is typically the final exam; tests or homework assignments set in the course of the semester are usually practice exercises, and count little if at all toward the final assessment. For the students, they are likely to be experienced as minor, even random, events, rather than milestones along the timeline of a course. Apart from the final exam, the major events are the regular weekly classes, and their very regularity means that the students' workload is fairly evenly spread throughout the semester, and there is little individual planning for students to do.

Here, as they have to learn, it is different.

• It is no longer the case that the students they see in one class they will see in every other class they attend; here, different students in the same class are likely to be working under different workloads and to different rhythms
• Over the substructure of regularly scheduled lectures and tutorials, and the reading and preparation that needs to be done for them, is superimposed one or more major assignments, each calling on them to express themselves in English in ways they may never have done before, and each with its own distinct burden of reading and preparation, to be completed by a deadline date which is typically inflexible and non-negotiable – as some will learn to their cost.

The importance of lead time

The class and assignment schedules published in Unit Guides are scrupulous in stipulating assignment deadlines and conditions of submission. What they typically do not do – cannot do? – is clarify for the student the steps and processes involved in producing the assignment, how long these are likely to take, and hence, exactly when the student should seriously start working on the assignment.

One exercise that students could be asked to work through in their first tutorial, then, is to create a Gantt chart of the unit for themselves.

This exercise is one way to demonstrate to the students that this sort of planning is (a) possible, (b) necessary, and ultimately (c) their own responsibility – that it is up to them to create a schedule that fits their own individual needs and circumstances.

It has the merit of providing a useful basis for group interaction and discussion in the first tutorial, and an opportunity for a range of individual but relevant information to come to light. In particular, it should enable students to predict assignment clashes and bottlenecks across the units they are concurrently enrolled in, and to bring them to their teachers' attention.

It may also, in fact, be the first opportunity some students have to realise that most written assignments are not simply occasions for assessing what has been learnt from lectures and set readings, but semi-independent learning projects in their own right.

Other resources

MUSO

The MUSO calendar can be viewed in a monthly, weekly or daily format, and is a natural place to put reminders of significant dates, events and milestones.

Other links

You may want to make sure your students are aware of the following webpages:

• Semester and Vacation Dates 2004-2010
• Examination Timetable & Information