Tutorial Engagement 6399 - Week 3

The first tutorials for the semester were held this week in Contemporary Issues in Accounting 6399. Tutorial attendance was very poor with only 65% of students attending.

I conducted a meet and greet session in all of the tutorials which seemed to work reasonably well. I then divided the class into small groups and assigned one question to each group. Each group was given a transparency and OHP pens (interestingly, most of the women chose a purple pen and the men chose red or blue) and about 15-25 minutes to prepare an answer then present it to the class. This worked fairly well in most tutorials. Some of the issues that did arise were:

• Some students were trying to find the "correct" answer in the textbook instead of discussing the issues.
• In T4 in particular, some of the more mature students (LV, SP, RL) dominated the discussion space and allowing the more reticent students to hide.
• Some students have appalling presentation skills.

I have told the students that the approach is not to find the answer in the textbook or the lecture notes and that they need to justify their conclusions with reasons. I will be giving more advice on presentation skills in tutorials as well. When I organise groups in future, I will try to arrange them to create a discussion space for the shyer students.