Tutorial Improvement

To preserve President Lowell's grand design of tutorial for all, the University relies heavily on group sessions and an increasing number of graduate student-tutors. While undergraduates doubtless prefer individual attention from a faculty member, the exigencies of more students, larger budgets, and a bulging junior faculty has left the University few alternatives in the matter.

Although the effectiveness of group tutorial is a quantitative problem, the success of a teaching fellow as a tutor depends directly on his quality as a teacher. The teaching fellow, without previous teaching experience, is expected to be neither a lecturer nor a question-asker, but to perform the nebulous task of stimulating his tutees' intellectual interest in the field, and to prepare the student for general examinations.

What is expected of the tutor is fairly clear, but how he is to accomplish it is left for the tutor to work out. Because only 254 of the 1,489 students in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences possess Harvard degrees, very few of those who eventually act as tutors have had previous experience with the program at all. Except for an occasional Harvard graduate who picked up some of the technique from his undergraduate tutor, the teaching fellow has only the vaguest idea what he is doing.

To be sure, various departments hold a meeting to inform tutors what forms must be filled out and in what number, but large numbers of graduate students have little knowledge of the broad concepts behind tutorial, how they work in practice, or what techniques are effective. They are thus left in a position of finding out by trial and error, or, as is more likely, not finding out at all.

In some departments, as in English where virtually all tutors are graduate students and in History where graduate students make up 75-80 percent of the tutorial staff, it would seem essential that some effort be made to acquaint tutors with the basic workings of the system. Briefing sessions should be held at which professors who are successful and popular as tutors explain how they go about planning and executing a tutorial program. Attention should also be given to more mechanical aspects, aside from mere record keeping.

Obviously, departmental briefing sessions do not insure good tutors anymore than a course insures good students. But the second-year graduate student who discovers himself a tutor would at least have the impession that the University took the program seriously and was sufficiently interested to communicate its broad purposes and the approach to effective student-teacher relationships.