Portrait of the online tutor as Thelonius Monk

In this article from the Autumn 2005 issue of Directions Paul Maharg (Glasgow Graduate School of Law) describes the improvisational role of the online tutor. Read more of Paul’s musings on legal education, technology, rhetoric and legal theory (improvisational or otherwise) on his weblog, Zeugma.

At a conference someone once asked me if I thought that online tutors should teach to learning outcomes, and that was all there was to the process. I made an answer that said something like…“well, outcomes are part of the process of teaching, and something to aim for online as well as in face to face encounters”, but it was an unsatisfactory answer, and this short article is to my mind a more useful answer to a valuable question.

Online tutoring is a complex process. It can go right in so many ways, and it can go wrong in even more ways. Ever since the 1960s there has been a movement in education to ‘teacher proof’ the curriculum. Some instructional designers have even provided word for word scripts that teachers are supposed to use in the classroom. As online tutors, should we use discussion forums in this way? I would say definitely not,and for this important reason – the best tutors practise a form of improvisation in the classroom. I would like to suggest that while outcomes are essential to curriculum design and tutor preparation, it is actually the skills of balancing improvisation with structure and outcomes that mark out the really good online tutor from the average one.

What sort of improvisation do I mean? Imagine tutoring as if you were a musician in a jazz trio. When you rehearse, you might play and think about the music on your own, but it’s only when you get together with the group that you begin to explore the musical piece and work out improvisations as a group. You take account of the character of other musicians’ play, you use your instruments and styles to play off, answer and elaborate, build upon each other, all within a framework of conventions that the group implicitly accepts and works within. You’ll use the styles of contemporary and earlier musicians, and incorporate that in your performance. You’ll have bits of improv routines you’ve learned (‘licks’) and you’ll be coming up with new phrases that you embed in your learned routines.

The result is a balance between external structure (of the music) and creativity. Improvisation in jazz groups and improv theatre are areas where the collective effort of the group contributes to the whole. One researcher described it as ‘collaborative emergence’ – collaborative, because the whole group of musicians or actors contribute to it, and emergent because it cannot be predicted in advance.

In a similar way, the online tutor’s creativity doesn’t come from thin air. It comes from his or her experience of legal knowledge and teaching practice which is brought into the discussion forum at the right time, it is sensitively handled, and often based on experience of earlier tutoring. In other words tutors develop their own little recipes or scripts (or licks) which they adapt and on which they improvise, depending on what students bring to the discussion or workshop. They also manage group improvisation within the tutorial group – they are sensitive to turn-taking, to timing, the proper sequence of events, roles, relationships, and much else going on in the forum. They can improvise on the different voices that arise from the group. They remember how students in previous tutorials and forums understood and misunderstood the law, and can use that to help students’ understanding.

Of course, things can go wrong. Tutors can be too tentative or not ‘visible’ enough in discussions. Others may stick rigidly to an outcomes structure and in doing so suppress student collaborative inquiry. Others again improvise and become carried away with their improv. There are stories from theatre (such as commedia dell’arte – a uniquely improvisatory form) and music that illustrate these negative scenarios. In baroque music, for instance, improvisation was quite common, but within a recognised structure and set of conventions. Once night in Dublin in 1742 when Handel was conducting one of his own compositions the violinist Matthew Dubourg played more and more complex modulations in his lengthy improvised cadenza before returning to the tonic; at which point Handel turned to him with the ironic words, “Welcome home, Mr Dubourg”.

Can we see improvisation happening elsewhere in our lives? Actually, it happens all the time in professional life. And it happens in our personal lives too. We often make lists (or outcomes…) before we go shopping in the supermarket, but in the supermarket we change our minds, buy different products, make decisions on the spur of the moment that the list just doesn’t contain. The anthropologist Jean Lave observed shoppers using lists. When they returned to explain to her the differences between the list and the purchases they’d made, they often talked about 2-for-1 offers, best buys, etc. But when she actually studied their experience and talked to them in detail about it, she discovered that they constantly shifted goals and negotiated a whole range of complex issues while shopping – who will eat this? Which recipes will I use this product in? I’m bored with X, how about Y? The social context of eating and food production in the home was a rich and complex background for purchase, and shopping was actually a process of discovering and recalling food preferences. In other words, when shopping with a list we attend to it, but we also improvise within a set of preferences, social contexts and guidelines, and the improvisation has purpose and clarity. The same is true of online tutoring. As tutors we have our list of outcomes, but we also need to attend to timing, turn-taking, dominance of some voices over others.

Can good online tutoring be taught? Undoubtedly, just as improvisation can be learned, and almost all the educational literature proves it. But it can also be ‘caught’, by watching other tutors, by team teaching, by reflection and above all by repeated improvisation, which may sound like a contradiction in terms, but is how musicians, dancers and many others learn their craft.

So to that person who asked the original question, here’s my answer: good online tutors don’t just teach outcomes. Good online tutoring is:

• paying attention to learning outcomes
• a balance of structure and improvisation, information and dialogue, creative leadership and community learning
• group-based, not tutor-centred
• listening to conversation and adding creatively and helpfully to it
• answering and improvising on questions, themes and topics that arise from the interaction of group and learning outcomes

Last Modified: 4 June 2010