Theo Murray
Highly Commended, Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Tutoring or Demonstrating
College of Arts and Social Sciences
Synopsis
Theo Murray’s approach to philosophy teaching is to target specific skills, using a playful tutorial environment and careful writing support. Doing philosophy well involves the exercise of many difficult skills, with some rarely mentioned explicitly. In trying to merely “do the reading,” to “participate well in class,” or to “write a good-quality essay,” many students get stuck on something and feel like they can’t improve: they develop a fixed mindset. Even high-achieving philosophy students often have fixed mindsets—if they’ve always received good marks for writing, they might feel naturally gifted, rather than well-practiced and still able to improve.
To tackle this, Theo’s pedagogy focuses on developing strong growth mindsets in his students—the mindset that all the capacities we use in philosophy are improvable skills. Growth mindset interventions have strong empirical support, and Theo achieves them in two ways. First, through a tutorial environment that is supportive, equitable, and playful. Against a background modelled on good professional philosophy discussions, Theo introduces original exercises, framed as games, that target those often-hidden philosophy skills. This framing brings a productive irreverence that motivates students to try new things, fail safely, and learn together from high-quality feedback. Second, Theo provides extra, targeted scaffolding and high-quality feedback for written assessments.
His students draft early, get feedback from Theo and their peers, then receive assessment feedback that makes it clear where the next draft could improve even further. His students often come to see writing as a clear and engaging puzzle, enjoying long-term improvement.