Collaborative Learning as a Means to Tutor Effectively

Related to classroom and diversity management is the practice of breaking the mould of tutor dominance in order to successfully facilitate student learning. This is in keeping with the theory of social constructivism. Tutors working with LES students needed to think of learning as a collaborative process in which they played a vital role. Thus, ideas of social constructivism are discussed in training so that tutors may internalize and reflect on them. Under the guidance of a peer tutor, students can reach what is termed by Vygotsky (1978) as the “zone of proximal development”. This is the level of potential development that a student cannot reach unless he/she collaborates with others and is guided. To ensure that this happens tutors need to understand how students can work as collaborative teams, wherein individual learning is essentially related to successful group learning (Vygotsky, 1978). To enable collaborative learning to successfully take place, tutors need to be trained in empowering students to actively participate in discussion and in class as a whole. Thus it is in this sense that tutors needed to break the mould of tutor dominant practice.

The contribution that my research attempts to offer on this point is that significantly a key aim of LES is to create independent learners and critical thinkers ready for

academic study. Allowing students to find their voices in tutorials is central to creating a student ready for the academy. This cannot be achieved if the transmission mode of instruction is applied in which students are passive. With regards to this feature of developing tutors, my findings are in tune with the literature (Falchikov, 2001:165) as the tutors expressed understanding and perception of themselves as facilitators of learning, with a view to enable students to take responsibility for their own work.

Once it is made explicitly clear that the role of the tutor is to create a space for students to openly express themselves and “explore” the work via discussion and group work, tutors also needed to have the where withal to achieve this. The literature (Falchikov, 2001:164) suggests that the ways in which tutors can be developed to be facilitators is to define the roles a tutor may adopt in training and then do mock tutorials characterized by role-playing exercises. I did not proceed in this way and there was criticism from the tutors in my findings levelled at the fact that there were no “practice” exercises in the initial training. I concede that demonstrating how facilitation works is a very effective means of showing tutors the difference between dominating and facilitating a tutorial. Thus upon reflection, I concede that this is an area of change that I need to make to my initial training and expand in tutor development.

Closely linked to the notion of facilitation is the idea of collaborative learning. My findings revealed that several key features from the development programme were significant for the tutors. These were: how to give the students individual voice by creating an atmosphere of safety and trust so that students feel comfortable expressing themselves, how to build relationships with students in a small group setting and finally how to address a group of mixed level abilities.

I suggest that it was as a result of the fact that the tutors were trained and developed as a collaborative team that enabled them to know how to reproduce collaborative learning practice for the students in tutorials. In this sense my findings are in tune with the literature (Arkin, 1981; Bruffee, 1993; Clark, 1998; Falchikov, 2001) in that the tutors operated as a collaborative team wherein they depended on each other to work out problems and not solely on an authority figure for guidance (Bruffee, 1993:1). As a collaborative team they experienced the importance of good interaction between people in which everyone’s opinion is valued. They could then in turn create this with the students.

A juncture at which my study extends the literature (Bruffee, 1993; Clark, 1998) is at this notion of collaboration. My findings showed that tutors recognized the advantages of drawing on each others literacies to the end that it served to enhance any deficit knowledge for example, a Linguistics based tutor could draw on the knowledge of an Economics tutor via discussion and visa versa. However, my findings also revealed that for this kind of exchange to work, flexibility and open-mindedness were needed in the group. Thus, not only did the collaboration between tutors serve to demonstrate to them how to work with students, but it also helped to make known to tutors how they had to be tolerant of each other. The issue of tolerance and managing diversity is another feature of training and development where my study modifies the literature.

The literature (Bruffee, 1993; Clark, 1998) describes the benefits of training and developing tutors collaboratively and sites several examples of this practice. These include: working out issues around tutorial material such as organizing and planning material as well as reflecting on and modifying tutorial material. However in my study the idea of collaboration goes further. This is because of the fact that the LES module demanded a collaboration of diverse academic literacies as a result of individualized subject disciplines.

In the above discussion I have mentioned several features of the initial tutor training from my study and have discussed how they add to, depart from or converge with the literature with a view to make improvements to my practice as well as the tutor development programme. The following discusses the findings in relation to providing ongoing mentorship to tutors.