Blue Tutors

Creating Self-awareness – Allowing Students to Learn Independently

There is a real end goal to our teaching ideas, although it might not be immediately obvious what that goal is. Ultimately we want students to not need a teacher; we want to create students who can learn independently, students who can teach themselves.

This idea probably seems intuitive from our teaching theories, but we’d like to emphasise that there is a profound step between teaching according to our theories, and developing a student’s ability to teach him/herself.

An analogy that works well is a parent teaching their child to ride a bike. The parent will hold the bike stable while their child pedals, and there will come a time when the parent feels that they’re not doing anything, and at that point they will let go. The child will then be riding the bike unaided.

The tutor’s role here is the parent, and the student is the child. The tutor will create, and hold the space for the student (holding the bike stable), and there will come a time when the tutor realises that he/she isn’t really adding anything to the lesson, and that the student is looking to the tutor for guidance that isn’t really needed (no longer needing to hold the bike stable).

In the analogy the parent will provide less and less support, taking their hands off finger by finger, until they can let go of the bike altogether, and this gives the child the self-awareness that he/she is riding the bike without help. The profound step is creating this self-awareness within a student, but it’s not as simple as letting go of a bike.

So how do we help a student to realise that he/she can teach him/herself? Once a period of teaching is over, stop, and ask your student to identify what you (the teacher) contributed. At first the student will probably feel that they couldn’t have learnt without you, but if you can sufficiently remember the questions that you asked, and recite them for your student then hopefully he/she will realise that everything came from him/her. You should then point out that the questions asked are questions that the student could ask of him/herself.

This is a slow process. You should be careful not to attempt this before you are very comfortable with a student, or before you’re certain that he/she is ready for it. Even then, it’s important to take your time. Try this first with a very short and simple period of teaching, something you’re certain the student has understood very well, so that there will be no confusion when you stop to have a discussion.

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