Tutorials and Supervisions

To develop my tutoring practice, I’ve been researching how an Oxford tutorial or Cambridge supervision runs.

I was struck by the questioning. Questions are chained together to (gently?) challenge students to defend their point of view. In a classroom of 25+ students, this is difficult, because questioning has to be bounced around the room to involve everyone. In a one-to-one or small-group setting, it becomes far more practical.

What interests me most is who gets challenged. In a classroom, we tend to reward a good response with praise and move on. Tutorials seem to do the opposite: the best responses are the ones that get pressed hardest.

Pressing a student when they are right, as well as when they are wrong, is a fantastic takeaway.

If you have experience of Oxford tutorials or Cambridge supervisions, please do comment or message me. I’d love to know more about the pedagogy and culture behind them, and how they differ from traditional classroom teaching.