Review:Teaching more students series

• 6. Supporting more students
  
• 7. Labs and practicals with more students and fewer resources
  
• 8. Managing more postgraduate research students

53 Interesting ways to supervise student projects, dissertations and theses

Contents

• Description of the books
• Review by Michael Jackson

Series title	Teaching more students
Details of individual titles	6. Supporting more students Diane Bochner, Graham Gibbs, Gina Wisker 1995 (ISBN 1 873576 42 0) 7. Labs and practicals with more students and fewer resources Graham Gibbs, Roy Gregory, Ivan Moore 1997 (ISBN 1 873576 51 X) 8. Discussing with more students Adele Graham, Barbara Grant 1997 (ISBN 1 873576 52 8)
Publisher	The Oxford Centre For Staff Development, 1992
For further information	The Oxford Centre for Staff and Learning Development, Oxford Brookes University Oxford OX3 OBP Tel: 0865 750918 Fax: 0865 744437 Reviews by Gary Hough and Michael Jackson of Books 1-5 are available on ultiBASE.

Title	53 Interesting ways to supervise student projects, dissertations and theses
Authors	Vicky Lewis and Sue Habeshaw
Publisher	Bristol: Technical and Educational Services
Date	1997
Description	172 pages ISBN 0 947885 92 7

Review by by Michael Jackson

1. Introduction
2. Description
3. Critical observations
4. Conclusion

Introduction

All four books concentrate on what can be done in teaching departments. Having reviewed the first five titles of Teaching More Students in this space, I will not repeat comments made already. While I recommend these titles, there are qualifications. I will first describe the books, then offer some critical observations, and draw a conclusion.

Description

In Supporting More Students (6) the strategies discussed include group tutorials, mutual assistance among students, greater documentation, developing independent learning, targeting support at the right time, supervising independent learning, and administrative support. Nowhere is this word 'support' defined; on this kind of omission more in the critical observations.

Labs and Practicals (7) counsels abandoning unrealistic aims; working to priorities; enabling students to work with each other; preparing students for lab work; using diagnostic checklists, computer based simulations, peer assessment, feedback pro formas, and specimen feedback.

Managing More Postgraduate Research Students (8) offers a self-evaluation questionnaire about supervision, guidelines for discussion with postgraduates, ground rules for meetings (preparation, focus, honesty), and putting them in touch with each other. There is also a Johari's window exercise (8, p.23) for research students to identify what is known and not known. Specifically the four panes are:

I thought this a very useful technique.

The key point in dealing with research students is to get them writing from day one (8, p.31). Managing More Postgraduate Research Students (8) has tactics to get them to write through the research process, from journals, logs, one page briefs, to free writing sections. 53 Interesting Ways to Supervise Students Projects, Dissertations and Theses is also particularly strong on stimulating students to write throughout the project, and not to leave the write-up until last (a recipe for disaster). It also contains some particularly helpful suggestions on interviewing students purposefully to crystallize their ideas. 53 Interesting Things books consist of 53 chapters, each standing alone, of 1-4 pages.

At the outset I said a department head might use Managing More Postgraduate Research Students (8) to evaluate a program. It recommends the following:

• formal communication
• codes of practice
• a director responsible for the research students program
• induction for post graduates
• training them for research
• providing academic support
• promoting a supportive and critical climate
• adequate resources and space.

Critical observations

In Supporting More Students (6) a student says, 'I don't know my tutor. He was just given to me as a name and he hasn't taught me so I don't really feel I can go to him to talk about my work, let alone about other problems' (6, p. 5) A lecturer is quoted, 'I just don't have the time to spend ... helping them sort out what to do with their essays' (6, p. 6).

In each of the other two titles similar pronouncements are presented and taken at face value without reservation. Of course, I have always heard my colleagues say that, since the beginning of my teaching career in 1968, but saying it is so does not make it so.

Moreover, there is in the pages of Teaching More Students a longing for the good old days of the past, again shorn of evidence. It is revealed in such comments as 'Higher education in the UK has in the past been distinguished by its remarkably low student drop-out and failure rate compared with European and North American higher education' (6, p. 7). I do not know how much difference the authors think is 'remarkable'. Nor do I know why it has been lower. There are alternative interpretations, a cynic might think it a reluctance to fail students.

The silent assumption is that a lower failure and drop out rate is good, and that it was due to higher levels of funding. We read of an 'overcrowded institution' (6, p. 19), but no definition of overcrowding is offered. In Labs and Practicals (7) we read that 'There have been progressive reductions in funding per student, in real terms', that 'Students are ... spending fewer hours in the laboratory and workshop', and that 'Class sizes have expanded in many courses as student numbers in higher education have increased' (7, p. 7). These assertions are piled high as if altitude were argument.

Sometimes the assertions are confusing. On page 9 of Supporting more students (6) we read: 'Unlimited access by students to their tutors is not a viable option in most institutions and where it has been retained it does not work well because student demand outstrips the supply of tutor time available'. 'Access' is never defined.

These kinds of laments sit ill with some of the modest prescriptions offered later such as posting and holding office hours (a practice made more glamorous by calling it 'surgery' hours (6, p. 9)). Two points arise from considering this recommendation. First, who needs to be told to have office hours? Second, if the scarcity of time alleged in the quotations from lecturers is true, no one will be in the office. If time is zero why bother with photos, names, and rooms (6, p. 28)?

An equally modest recommendation is to brief students before and after assignments by grouping them (we call these classes) rather than trying to do it personally and individually, with consequent unintended variation. Later it seems the authors have just discovered classes as when they write 'If the students in the group know each other they are more likely to feel comfortable about contributing to class discussions, are more likely to discuss work outside class hours and to share scarce resources' (6, p. 19). They recommend that teachers make students get acquainted and use team building approaches.

Supporting More Students (6) commends peer mentoring (6, p. 25) without realizing that in the case cited the student mentors concentrated on administrative signs and not on the significance of the material. The real problem seems to be a needlessly complex course structure. These often meet the needs of scholars but seldom of students. The appropriate response would be to address that structure, not to turn mentors into administrative advisors. Instead this misdiagnosis is now promoted as a national model.

We also read of the good old days when 'Students actually got to meet and know their tutors and talked with them regularly'(6, p. 7). The text does admit that personal tutoring was a mixed experience but asserts that 'most students used to experience fairly extensive and frequent contact with their teachers' (6, p. 7). I would like some evidence for this assertion.

My memory differs. When I began teaching in this university twenty-five years ago, lecturers minimised contact with students by creating bureaucratic practices like students submitting assignments to the department office and getting them back from cardboard boxes in the hallways in January. (We still do this.) There is no human touch in this. Twenty-five years ago tenured lecturers by and large were present in the university only on the days their classes were scheduled or pay days. Hardly an invitation for the kind of 'unplanned contact' Supporting more Students (6) extols (6, p. 7). All of this was done under a different policy regime. We have only ourselves to blame if we are forced now to live down to our own poor practices from the past.

This uncritical approach continues, the practices recommended are unencumbered with any systematic evaluation and few are proffered in a way that lends itself to evaluation. Three examples suffice:

1. All three titles recommend extensive documentation. In one case the recommendation is for a course guide on how to write an essay (6, p. 28). Students already receive more paper than they can assimilate or evaluate. Must every lecturer burden them with another? Furthermore, if every lecturer does, many of these guides will be idiosyncratic, emphasizing footnoting and not the meaning and learning of essay writing. They will have that focus because that is easier to put in a guide than meaning and learning. Moreover, words on paper can be read in different ways. Some students will misunderstand, and be even more firmly committed to their misunderstanding because it is on paper. While I, too, believe in documentation, it solves no problems; it but provides a record.
2. The authors note that 'Attendance drops off steeply as the demands of the first coursework assignments increase, as if the courses compete with rather than contribute to their performance' (6, p. 33). This is a real and genuine problem. What response do our authors offer? Add another module on study skills. This response compounds rather than deals with the problem. The real problem in this instance is either there is in fact too much work for students and so to survive they lighten their load, or students lack motivation. In neither case will offering them more teaching solve the problem. Too much teaching (for the students' ability) is the cause of the problem.
3. The authors also note that 'Students seem to have an insatiable desire to buy books on study skills, to be familiar already with most of the advice they contain, and to have a powerful aversion to actually reading them and taking the advice they contain' (6, p. 38). Once again their solution is more teaching. I might add, the same could be said of lecturers and teaching. We have an appetite for the kind of advice that appears in these pages, but seldom do we take it. More is the pity.

There are minor gaffs in the Teaching More Students titles, like the tiresome use of 'actually' for emphasis, acronyms and abbreviations like Cert Ed PAGE and CPD/CCE, contractions, and references in the text that do not appear in the bibliography.

More seriously, perhaps, each volume contains some cases of one page of more. These are referred to as case studies. I understand that a case study as distinct from a case contains analysis. These cases do not contain analysis, and so should be termed cases, not case studies.

Conclusion

The practices recommended in Teaching More Students do not seem to arise from a systematic review of the United Kingdom's experience in higher education. Instead they are drawn from such universities as Edinburgh, Auckland, Leeds, University of Technology Sydney, Melbourne, and Moray House College, Scotland. They privilege such subjects like Midwifery. All and all, the map of the practices recommended reads like the itinerary of a consultant. While Teaching More Students argues against an idiosyncratic and unreflective approach to teaching students, their own advice seems distilled from that kind of approach.

Other volumes in the Teaching more students series are also reviewed by Michael Jackson and Gary Hough on ultiBASE.

Titles are:

• 1. Problems and course design strategies
• 2. Lecturing to more students
• 3. Discussing with more students
• 4. Assessing more students
• 5. Independent learning with more students
• Video: Teaching more students (30 minutes)

About the reviewer