Designing a PAR
Basic Process
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Take what a school/department values about what it already does to provide
academic support and guidance for its students
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Also take what else it may be required to do to meet external demands
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Bring these together in a streamlined, integrated scheme
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Build a schedule of personal tutor meetings around year-specific, key events
for students and their tutors and provide them with basic agendas
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From these meetings spin off documentation in two directions
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records which the department needs for e.g. QA and its own purposes
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materials which students will value because they enhance their understanding
of their progress.
There are basically two aspects to consider:
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the programme of personal tutorials, including judging the timing of the
key meetings so as to be most useful and productive for staff and students
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the accompanying documents, including the basic agendas for the scheduled
meetings, the proformas which focus students' preparation for meetings,
the joint records of the meetings and materials for follow-up.
Schools/departments starting from cold on PARs are strongly recommended
to think through these two aspects on paper first, to clarify their design
ideas, before moving into IT with the Internet-PARs if they wish.
For example, the basic agendas for the scheduled meetings constitute
a school's/department's agreed definition of what its personal tutoring
should cover at specific points in the academic year for each yeargroup
of students. Schools/departments need to be clear on principles such as
this which they wish to operate, before beginning to set up their PAR on
IT.
Scheduling of tutor-tutee meetings
See Scheduling of tutor-tutee meetings for
possible programmes of personal tutorials.
See Ideal PAR programme for the latest
thinking.
Basic components of a PAR
See Basic components of a PAR for an outline
of the documentation needed.
Sample paper-based PAR: University of Nottingham, School of English Studies
See Download PAR documents for
a sample set of PAR documents (including examples of basic agendas for
scheduled meetings) which has been used in many departments as the starting
point for customising PARs.