Award ceremony for tutors: Honouring and exchange on good teaching
Last Tuesday, six dedicated tutors were given the opportunity to personally share their ideas for good teaching at the TUHH with our Vice President Teaching, as well as a ceremonial recognition of their teaching achievements.
The six tutors (Andrés Cortez, Fabian Krüger, Felix Schlösser, Marco Repke, Andreas Mohr and Robin Hohberg) are the 2020 teaching award winners. Among 18 very strong applications for the teaching award for tutors, these six particularly impressed the jury (Kerstin Kuchta, Katrin Billerbeck, Christian Kautz, Deniz Razi and Jan-Joshua Schmitt). Their supervisors from the institutes described them, for example, as a great support and a motor for innovation in teaching as well as an important interface between students and lecturers. Their students praised the good learning atmosphere, the enthusiasm, the comprehensible language and the great commitment also to the individual.
Their digital award ceremony on 10.11. was hosted by our vice-president Kerstin Kuchta together with our managing coordinator of the ZLL, Dr Andrea Brose, our professor for subject didactics of engineering Christian Kautz and myself. Additional appreciation was the participation of tutors’ supervisors from the institutes, current and former colleagues from the ZLL, family of the teaching award winners as well as the head of the nationwide
At the beginning of the event, Christian Kautz (himself winner of the 2009 Hamburg Teaching Award) and I addressed the great importance of tutors and their teaching format in general.
Tutors make a decisive quantitative and qualitative contribution to teaching. For example, despite the pandemic, their commitment makes it possible to welcome first-semester students in particular to small face-to-face events and to offer them good and personal support. This is especially important at a time when the word “lost” was chosen as the youth word of the year 2020, in order to facilitate contacts and orientation for the students, the majority of whom had to complete their A-levels digitally.
Surveys at the TUHH from Professor Kautz’s department also show that the methodology in these very exercises, which are mostly tutor-led, has a stronger influence on student performance than the lecturer leading the lecture (see graph). It is therefore very important that tutors are well
Afterwards, the six teaching award winners were honoured by Dr Andrea Brose and me with laudations and the entire screen was covered with symbols for clapping hands and thumbs up.
Then Prof. Dr-Ing. Kerstin Kuchta expressed her appreciation for the use of tutors in general and the six in particular and invited them to “write something in her book”. The tutors, who can contribute both their student and tutorial perspectives, took this opportunity to share their positive as well as problematic experiences and to make suggestions. One suggestion that is being considered is to start the tutoring contracts two weeks before the start of lectures in order to have more time for familiarisation with programmes and the creation of learning materials such as teaching videos.
In this way, the event not only contributed to honouring their remarkable achievements (laudations see here), but also to an exchange between the Presidential Board, represented by Kerstin Kuchta, and students or tutors.
JiTT= Just in Time Teaching
