← CSC 313 Teaching Computing

CSC 313 Active tutoring

Active tutoring

If you haven’t already, please sign up for a slot to tutor in the tutoring centre.

There will be an experienced tutor with you, but they are there to observe only. They will step in and help out if needed.

If you do not get any students to tutor during your session, (1) let me know, and (2) sign up for another session. (Talk to me if this is difficult.)

After your tutoring session, complete the reflection below by entering text into Canvas. 2–3 sentences for each question, though I’m expecting some answers to be longer than others, depending on your actual tutoring session.

If you helped multiple students during your session, feel free to write an answer for each student, or to submit two sets of answers, or to focus on particular students for particular questions where appropriate.

Reflection questions

  1. For which class(es) did your student(s) have questions?
  2. Describe what the student(s) needed help with. Were students asking for help debugging, or for conceptual help with some topic, or help starting a program, or …. ?
  3. What went well? Were there moments during the tutoring session that you were particularly happy with?
  4. What did not go as well as you’d have liked? What do you wish you had done differently?
  5. Did you ask the student about their own process (.e.g, “what have you done already on this problem?”)
  6. Did you find yourself growing impatient while tutoring? If so, how did you manage it?
  7. How do you feel about your accessibility (for example, confirming that bugs are normal)?
  8. Identify an instance where topics we’ve studied this quarter showed up during your tutoring session. For example:
    • Superbugs—Intentionality, egocentrism, parallelism bugs.
    • Programmer cognition—was the student’s working memory overloaded? Were they suffering from knowledge unavailability issues?
    • Problem-solving—Did you suggest any explicit problem-solving strategies? Examples include goal/plan analysis from the superbugs paper, the Design Recipe, etc.
    • Code comprehension strategies—did you suggest any explicit strategies to help the student make sense of the code in front of them? For example, variable roles were suggested in the Hermans book. If you suggested a strategy that you’ve found helpful but that we haven’t talked about, that is fine!