Success as a good tutor comes with practice and experience. This new approach to mathematics tutorials has many advantages. The students bring some completed work to the session, receive model solutions, and learn to read mathematics and be highly critical of their own efforts. Each student is given the opportunity during their presentations to verbalise their mathematical knowledge in a particular area. All students in the class are concentrating on the same problems in the same order.
Students can therefore help one another.
More time can be spent by the tutor in fine-tuning the student's written solutions. Since the students learn to self-correct, the tutor doesn't need to spend time looking for all the errors in each solution. Such a structured approach to tutorials means that more students can be cared for in a tutorial group than in the old approach, and every student can be catered for at their own rate of learning. When a tutorial session is finished, all of the students should feel that they have learnt something, and that they have information which has improved their knowledge and understanding of the topic. The Australian Mathematical Society Gazette is Copyright by the Australian Mathematical Society.