Tutorial Teaching

My teaching is pretty much entirely tutorial teaching. These are ~90-minute discussions with 2-4(ish) students centred around problems (done before the tutorial) across the whole Inorganic syllabus of the three years of the taught MChem course.

It’s an interesting pedagogy, and very intense. The dynamics are subtle and relate to the characters and identities of everyone there, as well as the topic and energy levels associated with the stage of the academic year, the day of the week, and even the time of day. It’s often exhausting to make a tutorial go well, and very easy to have one fall slightly flat.

So this year I bought a cube of tungsten.

What is The Cube?

One cubic inch of tungsten weighs about 300g (c/f a cubic inch of water: appx 15g). It is an extraordinary thing to hold. You see the cube and you think “that will weigh a normal amount for a cube” and you are wrong! It weighs so much!

The 295g mass of a cubic inch of tungsten; one litre of tungsten weighs 18kg.

My cube has gently rounded edges and a triangular stand. To hold it is to become aware that you could hurl it through a window; it would carry through pane-glass like a scream through a library. If you hold it for too long, you wonder what height you’d need to drop it from to break your own toe.

If you have never held a block of tungsten, what you need to understand is that it’s an incredibly distinctive experience; you’ll remember it like you’d remember a weekend mini-break or a good book. This is the exciting thing from the tutorial perspective: it’s about sharing an odd event in a social context.

Deploying the Cube

Tungsten comes up a lot in Inorganic tutorials. The element has a body-centred cubic cell. Band theory and gas-phase electronic configuration explain why it has the highest melting point of any element. It occasionally gets featured in coordination chemistry, but more commonly serves as a member of the classic sweep down group 6 to establish the general trends in the d-block. The organometallic chemistry of tungsten is extensive, perhaps being most prolific in the sub-field of Schrock carbenes.

Every time it comes up, I can wheel out the cube. “You guys remember tungsten” you say, setting it on the desk. A student picks it up and hefts it up and down a little. They pass it to another student, who does the same. There is a quiet pause. Everyone nods. Someone sets the cube back in the stand and everyone stares at it for a few seconds. “So in this question tungsten is in the +6 state. Is that normal for group 6? Chromium normally only gets to +3.”

Being Bodies

After a long spell of online tutorial teaching, it also feels significant that a cube of tungsten is a stubbornly un-virtual object. It’s awkward, urgent joy is that it’s stupidly heavy. You feel the cold edge of it as it pushes into your palm. You notice how clunkily it tumbles as you roll it into someone else’s hand. If it drops on the desk, you wince at the thud and check that it hasn’t left a big dent (it has left a big dent). Its presence reminds you, somehow, that you exist. If there is an antithesis to the black square on a video call, it is the tungsten cube.

That sounds a bit mystical, but it’s so important that this experience sits just a little bit beyond words. Sharing the cube is a social activity. It is funny in a way which makes fun of no one. “It’s so heavy.” “Yeah.“ “But, like, so heavy.”

The Tension of the Tutorial: Cognition and Affect

The tutorial pedagogy is often analysed in terms of cognition. This approach emphasises the act of thinking, and centres ideas like (mis)conceptions and feedback. On a cognitive view, students should be somehow better at thinking about the topic after a tutorial.

But it’s also possible to analyse the tutorial in terms of affect (crudely: emotion). My research students this year are advancing a model to describe the affective dimension of tutorials. Affect is important for motivation, and sustaining student motivation seems to be the central problem in my experience of teaching Oxford Chemistry students because of the unusually-high quantity of independent study. For an affectively-successful tutorial (using self-determination theory), students need to experience three things: autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

Autonomy in the tutorial is about feeling in control, and often students don’t feel control within the tutor-student power dynamic. Competence is about feeling able to do what’s needed, but that’s difficult when you have literally only just learned the reduction formula or the Dewar-Duncanson-Chatt model.

Autonomy and competence are not very cube-relevant, but these affective components interact strongly with aspects of cognition. It is obviously important that tutorials are used to explore concepts and address misconceptions. This kind of focus helps students learn.

But the act of learning can be affectively difficult sometimes. You’re made to do an organic problem at the board but you don’t know where to start? This is a situation of low autonomy (you had no choice) and low competence (you don’t know what to do). You might learn a lot from this encounter, but you might feel a lot as well.

Competence and autonomy are only two of the three affective considerations. The third, relatedness, is about feeling respected by your community. This is something the tutor has a lot of scope to develop systematically within the social context of the tutorial.

I like the cube of tungsten for this because it is about being with students in a way that is both fun and professional while not demanding any kind of academic analysis. It’s not about how clever or hard-working you are. It’s about experiencing the cube. It’s about your tutor wanting to share the cube with you. It’s about telling your friends later at dinner how heavy the cube was (“So hang on you’re saying it was just a…cube?” “A heavy cube.” “A heavy cube.”). All of this is about relatedness.

Conclusion

It’s hard to deny that elemental tungsten is chemistry-relevant (it is literally a chemical element), but it’s also hard to assert that chemistry-relevance is more than the flimsiest pretext for experiencing the cube. I’m not claiming that the cube helps students somehow understand chemistry. I’m claiming it helps them better-engage with the process of learning chemistry. It makes it a little bit nicer to be in academically-demanding tutorial situations (where your hard-won understanding of chemistry will be repeatedly dismantled and rebuilt).

I’ve wondered all year whether this the same thing as “edutainment”. I don’t think so. It’s about the relationships in the tutorial space rather than any kind of cognitive outcome. While a showy edutainment practical teaches you something (though probably something small), the cube teaches you exactly nothing.

Reflections on 2021-22 teaching: Tungsten in Tutorials