What’s The Point of Tutor Time?

by Bill Wilkinson & Chris Baker.

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This blog is about an oft overlooked part of being a secondary school teacher; the bit that stands between most of us and the lessons we carefully planned each morning…tutor time. 

Like good teachers, everyone remembers their best form tutor, maybe you remember the worst one too. It’s not surprising, you spent 15 to 30 minutes a day with your tutor, and if you were (un)lucky you sometimes had the same tutor for two years, maybe even five years.  What a privilege that is.  To be a part of someone’s life, every school day for five years.  It’s a big responsibility.  But what’s the point of tutor time?

First, it’s a handy central point for passing messages to/from kids, subject teachers and home. It’s an easy way to read announcements about new clubs or school trips. You can check they’ve got the right uniform and equipment, maybe lend a ruler and a pen or two. Maybe on Monday you check parents have signed planners.

So firstly tutor time is administrative.

But tutor time is more than this. It’s an ideal opportunity to build strong relationships between staff and between students and their peers. Especially if tutees and tutors can be kept together over several years.

Some schools use tutor sessions to present PSHE, Citizenship or sessions on “British Values”.  It’s rare that teachers are given any training or guidance on delivery of these sessions and quality assurance is often little more than ensuring delivery. Students often don’t enjoy these sessions, they can be stiff and formulaic, slides full of words to read out, an “inspiring” TED talk to watch, questions for the students to discuss in groups that have correct answers the tutor will steer everyone towards. Like any intervention the success of these types of sessions will vary hugely from school to school and from classroom to classroom.

These sessions have an important purpose, and perhaps would be better delivered by specialist teachers in PSHE or citizenship classes. Perhaps a compromise would be if all teachers were given training in effective delivery of these sessions, but INSET and meeting time is precious and there are many other priorities.

But lets imagine it is done well, we can dream bigger of our goals for tutor time.  Those 15 minutes a day can add up.  Even five minutes of “leftover” tutor time after administrative tasks or a personal development session that didn’t catch students’ imagination can be put to a better use.

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Whilst educational trads and progressives might disagree on methodology, the one thing that all in education can surely agree on is that school education should be about more than the knowledge and skills students learn during subject lessons. They should leave with more than just exam results.

Students need to grow, mature and learn about the rich and varied world they live in. Students should have their horizons broadened, especially those with limited life experience within their own lives, families or communities. 

But how? It seems pretty common for schools to have a bit of a maths challenge, or maybe a news quiz, but let’s aim higher.

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For years Chris has run a twitter account called @tutorgroupthink, with the sole aim of finding cool stuff for tutors to share with students.  Each day he would post a link or picture on the account for teachers to share, briefly with their students.

Now, in collaboration with Bill, we’re aiming higher. Partly triggered by Twitter’s collapse, partly because twitter was behind many schools’ internet firewall, so couldn’t be used directly, we’re going to collect stuff every week and present it in a Google Slides presentation that can be shown directly to students.

Each day there will be a single slide featuring something for students to know about, but also to think about. With questions that students can discuss.  We aim that this will be easy to deliver to classes, but also the questions and topics are low stakes with no right answers. In our experience these low stakes topics can improve relationships between teachers and their classes and encourage dialogue between peers who are reluctant to discuss meatier PSHE-type topics.  Whilst not irrelevant, our topics can therefore be a warm up or practice to the more important subject matter. 

We also aim that the topics will help broaden students’ horizons and introduce them to artworks, news stories, music and anniversaries of events that they might not otherwise know about.  Often we’ll have a link so that you can delve further into a topic if you have time or your students are particularly interested. 

In the last few weeks we’ve covered topics as disparate as the repeal of the USA’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, the unusual “time pyramid” that will take more than 1000 years to complete, and the fact that consecutive British World Champions at 1500 m grew up running at the same Edinburgh Athletics Club. A pretty remarkable coincidence or was something else at play?

We’d love it if you bookmarked our presentation and showed it to your tutees when you have a spare minute or two and would like to open their minds a little to something new.

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So tutor time should be administrative, it should be educational and it should be eye opening. It should be fun too.  Because that helps with the relationship building and makes the admin and educational bits easier too.  So If you’ve still got more time left over in your tutor time, here are some more examples of quick, fun activities you can do with them.  Create a bookmark folder along with a link to Tutor Group Think.

• Heardle Decades – The main daily Heardle hosted by Spotify has gone (RIP) but there’s still a range of other daily music guessing quizzes. It’s amazing how much better teenagers are on 90s and 00s than they are on the most recent 2010s stuff. Modern music really is rubbish. 
• PuzzGrid – Only Connect style word walls, with 3 minutes to sort into categories and come up with the links. (This site allows you to submit your own too).
• Worldle, Globle and if you’re super geeky Tradle, to get your geographic quiz juices flowing.
• Run a silly quick competition. For example a rock-paper scissors tournament (we did this whole school and each form’s winner went to the champion-of-champions tournament at the end of the week). Or run a “world cup of” vote, for the best… e.g. chocolate bars.  Run it again next year, will the same chocolate bar come out champ again? 
• Word Of The Day from Merriam-Webster, there’s a quick 2-minute podcast you can play to your tutor group if you don’t want to read the page. They might enjoy playing the Wordle each day too; that’s still going, you know.
• Quote of the Day.  Will today’s quote give your tutees pause for thought?
• Daily Dose of Internet. It’s not daily, but every few days there’s a new compilation of recent viral videos.  Always safe for presenting in school, but sometimes shocking. 
• Read to your tutor group.  Books with short chapters on various topics (such as Scott Allsop’s brilliant History books 366 Days and Another 366 Days or Randall Monroe’s What If…? and How to…) are great books to read a short chapter to if you have a spare five minutes.
• While we’re on books, if your tutor group likes a quiz, buy one of the Pointless Quiz books, that way, just like in the TV show, everyone can give an answer, but the most obscure (but correct) answer wins.

If you have any more suggestions, especially brilliant websites to share, let us know on Threads (@chrisbaker108 and @drwilkinsonsci) or in the comments below, and let’s make Tutor Time a rich and engaging start to every day where we don’t waste a minute of the precious time we have with our students.