My tutor doesn’t like me and that impacts on my assessment!

Once you have enough enough training courses under your belt, you are bound to have heard this complaint, probably more than once. It is one of the most common ones, coming from trainees who have difficulty accepting feedback. There can be many reasons why this is so, but in this post I’d like to focus on a very specific one: the tutor changeover, usually half-way through the course.

Many thanks to Julie Lhnr and Diana Vaselenko for inspiring this post with their questionnaire on Swapping Tutors.

It is a common requirement on most training courses that trainees should work with at least two different tutors for many different reasons, the obvious one being to reduce the chances of complaints as the one above. One can think of many other benefits of this arrangement, which I am not going to list here; let us just mention a major one: experiencing different teaching and training styles.

But just swapping tutors mid-course is not enough. There are several other procedures that have to be in place in order to ensure the changeover has a positive impact on the overall quality of the course, and of course this involves not only course tutors but also the school administration as well. The following points are addressed to both.

The selection process

No school can really afford to turn away trainees these days, but you can at least be prepared for what it’s going to take to keep difficult trainees from ruining a whole course. During the interview part of the process:

• Prepare a careful list of questions, aimed at receiving feedback and working with others, so that you can spot potential problems early on, as much as possible.
• Let tutors know from the start which trainees may need careful handling: DO NOT let them walk into the course blindly!
• Make it very clear during the interview, and preferably in writing as well, that there will be a tutor change and that it is a course requirement. Also, explain in no uncertain words, that it is an assessment criterion whether trainees take feedback into account.

Be transparent

It’s not enough to clarify from the start what the procedures are, why tutors have to swap and what this means. This level of transparency has to be kept up throughout the course:

• Share pre-course tasks and all assignment and TP feedback reports in a common folder, accessible to all course tutors.
• Encourage tutors to go back to each other’s notes when facing claims like “the other tutor had asked me to do the opposite!”
• Do not hesitate to quote specific feedback given by other course tutors, mentioning the specific TP/assignment it was given: make it objective – not personal!

Encourage inter-tutor communication

Tutors should keep tabs on each other as much as possible. Of course, it is up to each separate school’s procedures and each tutor’s willingness to go the extra mile, but it can be extremely helpful with diffusing potentially difficult situations.

At this point, I’d like to make something very clear: tutors are NOT obliged to spend extra time liaising with each other, usually without any remuneration, trying to troubleshoot various situations. It is also the school’s responsibility to make the tutor’s work easier, since it is for their mutual benefit. I am well-aware that this is not always the case and I am not trying to guilt already overworked and probably underpaid tutors into investing even more of their time and effort into their work. The points suggested below should be relatively painless and easy to implement, always at the tutors’ discretion.

• Spend 10 minutes looking at the latest TP feedback before you go into an input delivery or assisted lesson planning session; you can then be prepared for potentially disappointed, over-confident or even aggressive trainee attitudes: you’ll know what probably prompted this and therefore you may be able to do something about it.
• Hold a brief 15-minute meeting with the other course tutors once a week, just to check what is going on and who might need extra help. Chances are you can identify weaker trainees who will need extra support, compare trainee attitudes towards different tutors, and generally present a united front, making sure you maintain consistency in feedback and support.
• Do not hesitate to ask the other tutors for advice on how to handle difficult situations, checking how they would normally handle it or what the school procedures are in such situations. If there is an official complaint made, you may be the last to find this out, so make sure you have let everybody know a specific trainee is having a difficult time, how exactly this happened and what you’re planning to do / you have done about it. Take special care to let the school admin know about potential problems as soon as you’re sure what is happening: they should appreciate your professionalism. It does come back to transparency.

Involve all tutors throughout the course

This is a no-brainer, but may not be feasible in all circumstances. Of course, you will have a higher incidence of trainee complaints such as the above, if the trainees have never met the second course tutor before the transition. This would mean they’d spent all their time on the first half of the course with one tutor, for better or for worse, getting used to a specific way of doing things and will resist change anyway, especially when feeling stressed and insecure.

What can you do then? Depending on how much leeway you have, you may try one or more of the following suggestions:

• Make sure you can share as many input sessions as possible between tutors; include a couple of shared sessions if possible.
• Share assignment marking among tutors, double-marking as many papers as possible.
• Make no secret of the fact that tutors compare notes on the trainees’ work and follow everybody’s progress closely.
• Capitalise on the fact that each tutor may have a different way to approach certain aspects of teaching, and therefore has different tricks to show the trainees. (Keep fingers crossed you don’t hit a wall of trainees saying “I want to learn the one correct way”).

It all boils down to consistency

What will ultimately seal the deal though is taking the trouble to be on the same page as the other tutor, regarding the following:

• Starting sessions on time
• Delivering feedback on the same day, e.g. within 24-hours of the TP
• Being as detailed in your feedback as you feel you need
• Delivering teaching materials and TP points at the pre-agreed time, at least 48 hours before the corresponding SLP session.
• Returning assignments on the pre-agreed date
• Strike the right balance between being flexible and observing course rules

If you are consistent with the above throughout the course, it will take a very negative trainee to claim they were treated differently in the second part of the course. Hopefully!

Final thoughts

Let me close this post by a rather obvious observation. Yes, there will always be trainees who will come up with this sort of complaint, no matter what you do to avoid it. The steps suggested above are not fool-proof: they’re just ways to preempt and diffuse such situations. None of them can hold a candle to a really negative, defensive, determined-to-complain-about everything, none-of-this-is-my fault attitude which – fortunately only a few – trainees may bring to a course.

For those cases, I feel for you… If you’d like a post about how we may deal with these trainees, let me know in the comments below.

Images by Freepik