Blue Tutors

Justification for Our Guiding Principle

To start with we’ll state the simplest way to define ‘teaching’. There may be lots of other qualities that you think a teacher must have, but everyone would agree that:

It is a teacher’s role to affect change in a student, to ‘teach’ the student something.

The important question is: how does a teacher know that they have affected a change in the student? How does the teacher know that something has been taught? In fact isn’t it true that unless teachers know that something has been taught then they haven’t done their job, they haven’t completed the teaching? This is an important point. A teacher’s role is to know with the highest degree of certainty possible that a student has learnt something.

It is a teacher’s role to not just affect a change in a student, but also to confirm that there has been a change.

There are many types of evidence a teacher can use to guess whether a student has understood something. Some teachers will think only about the clarity of their explanations, and not about anything the students say or do. Some teachers will ask a student to state whether or not they have understood something, asking “do you understand?” and taking an affirmative response to mean that the student does understand. Another method is to use a student’s body language and/or try to empathise with them to guess whether they have understood. Many psychologists will say that this can be a very effective and powerful tool, but will also concede that the responses the teacher is looking for can be faked or misunderstood.

The obvious solution is to simply ask the student to demonstrate understanding. This doesn’t require the students to judge whether they have understood something, and it doesn’t require the teacher to use indirect signals to assess a student’s level of understanding. By asking students to explain an idea, to verbalise their thought process, the teacher can say with virtual* certainty that a student has understood an idea, or not. Maybe more importantly, it lets the teacher know exactly what students are thinking; if students don’t understand something, then asking them to explain an idea will communicate to the teacher (and hopefully to the students themselves) where the understanding is lacking.

(*It is of course arguable that it is impossible to prove whether someone has actually understood something. Even a ‘perfect’ explanation could have been a lucky guess, or could overlook a crucial point that is not understood. However, eliciting response is the best way known to us to demonstrate with as much certainty as possible that an idea has been understood, and it’s interesting to note that even if the response doesn’t absolutely guarantee perfect understanding, it does demonstrate an attempt to understand, and that the student has thought comprehensively about the ideas.)

An important point to make here is that even if you disagree with this idea, can you argue that any teaching wouldn’t be improved by asking students to verbalise their thought processes? The worst case scenario is that a student already understood something perfectly before you asked for an explanation. There appears to be only one potential criticism, and that is that it can make a student feel pressured when responses are requested so often (some teachers have found this when they have begun to teach according to our methods). However, this is generally because students are used to being lectured to, both at school and at university, and, sadly, even in some university supervisions. Once students become used to being taught in the way we prescribe, they become more comfortable with the teaching method.

Continuing the ideas leads us logically to requiring students to decide everything about the way they learn, and this allows independent learning, something which other teaching methods don’t allow if the teacher doesn’t elicit responses from students (because then the teacher is integral to the lesson).

It is not the reason for the teaching idea, but a positive side-effect is that the student cannot be passive when being taught. Lessons engage and interest students, and ensure that they understand each step before a lesson moves on. If the teacher is lecturing to a student and not eliciting responses then most students will have a relatively short concentration span, and will not understand everything that is said (imagine a conversation where the person you’re talking to speaks for 5+ minutes, do you take everything in?).

In summary, we believe that our basic teaching idea, the idea from which everything else is logically deduced, must be the cornerstone of any one-to-one teaching. We do not deny that there are other methods, other ideas that ‘can’ work, but if a teacher doesn’t require a demonstration of understanding from a student, then that teacher is not as effective as a teacher who does.

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