After 10 years part-time with the same training organisation, I have been culled! Long story short, I refused to take a group of 9 lads through the 18th in a classroom situation back in June due to C19 ( I am at that age where I dont want to get the damn thing). So fair enough, in steps the PAT tutor. Good man he is too, not from an electrical background and wouldnt know the difference between an ACB and a SPD! Still, he presented a 3-day course that was well received, more especially since everyone passed. I have no idea of the content other than that it included hundreds of multiple-choice questions. Happy with the outcome, and also perhaps because the tutor was half a hundred cheaper than me per day, poor uncle Lyle has been dumped! Yes, my feathers are ruffled a tad but perhaps the course that I presented which, I felt, was grounded on good solid learning is really not the ticket for an industry that just wants success in an exam! Ah well, back to shopping in Lidl!
I'd bet that the students wouldn't have remembered a thing and would have struggled to pass a few days later.
In my time in RN, I had an ongoing tussle with the training wallahs. Their principle was that any (Powerpoint) presentation should be capable of being presented by anybody. The problem with that is that they put errors into my slides and of course if you are not a subject matter expert, you cannot answer any questions which may be posed.
I think that 'your' students were short changed, but I imagine that all they wanted was a tick in a box.
Thank you Mike and Chris. I was being a little bit tongue in cheek with respect to the situation. I have my own (touch wood) successful business. Teaching was very much a part-time affair that I thoroughly enjoyed. I guess that I dont fit well with the "here are the answers, dont worry about the questions" type approach. I have already been contacted by another training provider that I know has more respect for learning outcomes.
I was only joking about Lidl, by the way. Perfectly good shop, Lidl, but for some reason my good lady prefers M&S. Perhaps there is some kind of analogy in that somewhere!
My original point was really about tutor calibre. You might think that I am adopting a rather snooty view, quite the contrary, I just feel that we are losing good old fashioned understanding in the pursuit of exam success at any price. I have been tutoring both part and full-time for over 30 years and only once, 20 years ago, was I assessed for my ability in that role. Peer review with a good critical eye might smarten things up a bit!
It’s a balance between hothousing and coaching to pass the exam and actually teaching the students something that they will remember and take away with them.
If you have a group of students who have not taken an exam for donkeys years they do actually need coaching on exam techniques and may even need teaching how to look things up in a book as most have not read a book for years and have no idea of how to go about using the indexes and headings or how to thumb through a book flicking the pages to get to where they need to be.
I did the 16th edition course as ten weeks of evening classes and at the end of it felt I had had time to learn things, as there was a week in-between classes to fo home work and revise. The update courses I did in one day, the 18th I was told I had to do three days, which was a bit mad as I did a sixty mile commute each way on top of everything else. I came home and revised and find mock exams, but didn’t feel I learnt anywhere near as much as I did when I did the 16th.
...I dont fit well with the "here are the answers, dont worry about the questions" type approach....
Reminds me of one of the tales in Richard Feynman's book Surely you're joking, Mr Feynman. He taught for a year in Brazil and found that the students would be able to answer a question one day but not the next, which he finally realised was due to the way the questions were phrased. They had learned the answers to the questions, but not what they meant. It was the difference between teaching students to pass an exam and actually teaching them physics!
