Instructors and students: Achieving a good balance between rotation and repetition
Recently my team and I were faced with a decision to take: An initial training course is starting the Tower Rating phase. We have 48 students and 12 instructors. The decision was to chose the rate of rotation between students and instructors. Or to put it in another way, how many times and how often would an instructor do an exercise with a particular student.
In the discussion we had, we analysed the benefits of free rotation, i.e. for a student to see as many instructors as possible thus getting as many different experiences and approaches as possible, to those of grouping students with instructors so that the instructors can better follow the student progress and would be in a better position of helping them with their weaker areas.
Each scheme has its weaker side: Free rotation with 48 students, means that the instructors will never be able to build a rapport with the students. The experience would be too cold and a lot of the richness that can come from this relationship would be lost. Grouping the students for the whole duration of the rating course and tagging them with a number of instructors would then make them miss on a wealth of experience.
We finally opted for a mix of the 2 schemes. Our rating course has 4 phases. 2 are relatively short and the other 2 are longer. We have grouped the students into 4 groups of 12. Each group is assigned to 3 instructors. This group will stay fixed for the duration of the short phases or for half of the longer phases. The groups are then mixed and so are the instructors.
In this way, we think, since each phase has got specific objectives, each instructor could concentrate on a number of students for the duration of the phase (or for half of it) A rapport can be built. Then to ensure that the students get different experiences, because after all, once they will start working they will have to work with a range of different people who whilst using the same procedures, have different approaches, ages and background, they will get a different instructor trio 6 times in the course (which means that they will get to see all the instructors at least for 1 phase or 1/2 a phase and will get some instructors twice.
We think that this is the best approach in the given situation. Now we will monitor the course quality…
