How to prepare for tutorial teaching

I. The point of degree-level learning

The point of degree-level learning is understanding, not knowledge, even though you need the latter for the former.

In many ways you gain understanding in philosophy in the same way that an artist or a musician gains an artist's or a musician's understanding: lots and lots of exposure to the art in question, and lots and lots of practice.

In philosophy, this means ongoing study, thought, questioning of yourself and others, and—most importantly—repeated attempts to articulate arguments and positions. If you're not permanently unsatisfied with the state of your understanding and interested in the book, the argument, or the idea that will deepen it, then you're probably not doing it right! It will take some experimentation to find the way of working that suits you best, but that's roughly the ideal.
 

II. How to think about the tutorial

With respect to any given philosophical topic, the tutorial is almost the very first stage in the development of your thinking—like your first piano lesson. Just as you might be given a piece to try to learn for your first lesson, so you're given a question to try to answer for the tutorial. No one expects you to play the piece perfectly; similarly, no one expects you to give a totally compelling answer to the essay question. But your good-faith efforts constitute material to work with.

In a first piano lesson, your teacher might point out that you're hunching too much, or that you tend to hit the notes too hard when your thumbs play them, or that you haven't noticed the key signature, or that you're not taking account of phrasing. But it would be silly to think that merely pointing these problems out is enough to solve them. And there may be many weeks or months yet of work to be done on the piece you've been given to learn, trying to improve your playing of it in respect of these various problems, until it's really the best it can be in your hands.

Likewise, in the tutorial, your tutor may point out considerations that you've failed to give due weight to in your essay, or places where you've made a fallacious inference, or gaps in your reasoning, or alternative interpretations of a text or example that you've adduced in support of your argument, or logical possibilities that you've mistakenly disregarded. It would be a mistake to think that once you've had these things pointed out to you, your understanding of the relevant topic is complete. On the contrary: you need to practise making the relevant arguments more, now taking into account the points in question. And this will reveal new possibilities, new arguments, maybe lead you to rethink your conclusions. It will make the texts on the reading list more illuminating, too. Even things you read only a couple of days beforehand will disclose new ideas after the tutorial discussion. The tutorial is only the first step.

(Thus, when it comes to revision, I urge you not simply to ‘go over’ your tutorial essays. That's like supposing that all you need to do to play the piano piece perfectly several months later (with no intervening practice) is remind yourself that you hunched, hit the keys too hard with your thumbs, etc. If that's all you do, your performance will probably be no better than it was in the first place.)

On a degree course, you're basically on your own. We supply the questions that motivate the study in the first place, and we direct you to people who have said interesting things in response to those questions. And in the tutorials, you get a big chance per topic to try out your reasoning with someone more experienced in thinking about these questions than you. (You also get lots of other chances, because most tutors are happy to receive emailed questions about topics from students who are still thinking about them after the tutorial. Too few students take these chances!)

Additionally, across the degree's tutorial teaching as a whole, you get coached in various philosophical techniques, reminded of errors you're prone to make, etc. So, again, it's like learning the piano (or to paint, or to play football, or to do more or less anything involving complex skills): lessons are both opportunities to have your playing of a specific piece scrutinised, and, taken altogether, an extended coaching session in general playing techniques. But ultimately everything turns on your independent pursuit of the discipline in question.

If you think about the tutorial in this way—make good faith efforts to answer the questions you're set, and then use the tutorial to try to improve your independent philosophical thinking on that question and in general— you'll reap rewards. Don't worry about being wrong. It would be strange if you got everything right first time, and most people don't even get things right the tenth time. I'm still getting them wrong several hundreds of times down the road.

If, by contrast, you think of your tutorials like an eight-year-old who's being forced to have piano lessons despite never practising, you'll waste your time here.