18th February 2010 9:00
By Blue Tutors
What are the factors affecting a successful relationship between a tutor and a student? The obvious answer is how well the tutor is able to teach, but that’s not the only reason that students take into account when they decide whether to have a large number of lessons, rather than stopping after just a few.
Something that we’ve found is that a tutor’s first impression goes a long way to creating a situation where students, and parents of students feel happy. From the moment the tutor first calls or emails the student, and when they first meet in person, judgements are made about how helpful the tutoring experience is.
Students (or more commonly, parents) have an idea about their perfect tutor, and they’re looking for that person to turn up for the first lesson. The first time we get feedback from a student the comments given often refer to the tutor’s personality, rather than their teaching, and similarly, when a student is unhappy with a tutor at an early stage, the tutor’s teaching ability is rarely criticised.
This does seem like a shame; ideally we want to match tutors and students where the teaching will be the most effective, not the best match in terms of personality. Obviously matching personalities do go a long way to creating a good learning environment, but the balance must be right, and sometimes teaching ability is overlooked if personalities don’t match. However, there have been occasions where students have commented on being unsure of their tutor at first, but after a few lessons have realised that the benefit received from the tutor’s teaching far outweighs the slight doubts about personality clashes.
How does all this help? Well tutors should make a real effort to create a good first impression, so that students are less likely to request another tutor before finding out how well the tutor can teach. And students should be a little more patient if a tutor doesn’t impress them immediately, because they may find that the tutor quickly exceeds their expectations.