I am a specialist technician in Physical Computing, which is a significant student-facing role. Here, I will discuss an instance of a demeaning student during their tutorials and make some recommendations.
Tutorials
At the Creative Computing Institute (CCI), we have diploma students which come from all the other colleges at UAL and spend a year with us to train in computer science. The main delivery is lectures, yet we also have technical labs which students can use, borrow materials (kit) from and which have their own specialist technicians.
As a legacy from the pandemic, we also run a booking system where students can book tutorials for 15 minutes. This helped the technical team manage skillsets, available time and allows technicians to achieve other job-critical tasks (and get some lunch!).
Discussion
Students can be very demanding to the technicians, and as such we have a duty to manage their expectations, and prioritise projects as per the deadline and student capacity (Svinicki, M., & McKeachie, W. J. 2011).
In some schools, there is the expectation that technicians are responsible for building parts of a student project that is outside their area of expertise, however at CCI the expectation is that the student builds the project themselves, with, if needed, extra advice from the technical team. Nevertheless, there are always some students who try to get us to do their projects for them.
One student I can think of from last year was not getting the technical concepts of how to measure the weather with a weather station he had borrowed from us. I gave them a 15 minute tutorial, and set out some step-by-step projects that I have given others in the past and told him to come back after he had completed them. He arranged another tutorial the next week, and brought me a doughnut from the canteen. He hadn’t grasped the knowledge from the project book I gave him, and had brought the treat to sweeten me up to do the coding for him.
I asked him when his deadline was (2 weeks) discussed pulling back the project to be less technical. However he was committed to the concept and basically sulked when I told him to scale back the project.
A thorough search in UAL and and google scholar resulted in not much support and so I went to my team to get advice, although I did find work around helping students help themselves with generative learning strategies (Pilegard & Fiorella, 2016).
The next few days, he would contact every technician on our team, await our arrivals to campus. Each would provide example code, and sit with the student calmly and offer advice, but the student would not grasp the concepts and could not code the code needed for his project, not would he change his concept.
At this point we decided to contact his tutors and the course leader and explain the situation. They advised him to write up just the concept and leave the code out, which enabled him to pass he module, but without a working project.
This is just one example of many our technicians have to confront and attempt to manage expectations. We have a duty of care and that includes fairness. I always recommend reading materials and workbooks that help develop skills that should have been taught in class, however there are always students who think of technical resources as people who will do the ‘dirty work’ for them.
Are they entitled? I couldn’t find any UAL policy inn this matter, and I believe this is an area we should investigate and produce guidelines of balancing the need of one student and being fair to all the students, that can be shared with the student.
In an effort to be liked (Kornell, N., & Hausman, H. 2016), I felt pressured to write the whole code for the student as his learning difficulties got in the way of his objective and I suggest a review of professional practice support for me and other technicians in these situations.
Outcome
In the end I did wrote the code for him, but 3 moths after the assessed work, for a voluntary show in which the work wasn’t assessed. I gave him loads more resources, and on the day of the opening, he still didn’t have it working, and so I saved the day for him.
References
Celeste Pilegard, Logan Fiorella, Helping students help themselves: Generative learning strategies improve middle school students’ self-regulation in a cognitive tutor,
Computers in Human Behavior, Volume 65, 2016, Pages 121-126, ISSN 0747-5632, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2016.08.020.
Kornell, N., & Hausman, H. (2016). Do the Best Teachers Get the Best Ratings? Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 570. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00570
This study explores the relationship between teaching effectiveness and student evaluations, suggesting that students may have unrealistic expectations of their teachers, which can lead to entitlement and biased evaluations.
Svinicki, M., & McKeachie, W. J. (2011). McKeachie’s Teaching Tips: Strategies, Research, and Theory for College and University Teachers (13th ed.). Cengage Learning. http://ndl.ethernet.edu.et/bitstream/123456789/29260/1/5..pdf