“Having to be in the students’ shoes was a really good experience for us.”
When Jessica completed the ATT4 programme, she was a Teaching Advisor. She looked after all the tutors on all the Skills Update campuses. She took care of induction, as well as coaching, teaching support and professional development.
A corporate policy was introduced to support each Skills Update tutor through the ATT4 programme. This was to ensure the organisation’s tutoring skills were as effectual as their mass of trade experience and vocational knowledge.
For Jessica, doing the course was a great opportunity and being online made it much more accessible. The course raised her awareness of how she could balance the wealth of experience her tutors had with the skills they hadn’t yet mastered. She realised the importance of understanding ‘who we are as an organisation, ourselves, and who our learners are going to be’ and then matching all of those things into their preparation for delivery.
She shared her experience of supporting tutors who completed the course with her. “The programme was definitely agile, and the slides were easy to navigate. If you got it wrong, you could try something else. You could re-read again. Anybody with a learning challenge could just think, ‘Hey let’s just read that again. Let’s just think it through because it’s practical and it’s logical.’” Jessica says.