18th March 2010 9:00
By Blue Tutors
A common thing to hear from an inexperienced tutor is ‘I have a great method for explaining this’ or something similar. Why is this something which only an inexperienced tutor would say? Well because as tutors gain more experience they realise that a method which works for one student, might not work for another, and that they cannot force a particular method on their students.
This tends to occur when a student is studying in a particular way, and specifically a different way to that in which their tutor would study. Assuming that neither method is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ the tutor must try to see the student’s difficulty from the student’s point of view, and try to the student according to their method of doing things. However, what some tutors do is to simply tell the student to approach the problem in a different way, the tutor’s way.
Why does this create a problem? For a start, the student is likely to become frustrated. They won’t understand why the initial method didn’t work, and if they are used to using their own method, it will be more difficult to adjust and adapt to the method that the tutor has asked them to use. A more important problem is that the tutor hasn’t taken into account the way that the student learns best; everyone is different, and we all learn in different ways. If the tutor is a very visual learner, and the student a very aural learner then it’s obviously ridiculous to ask both tutor and student to do things in the same way. The onus is on the tutor to adapt to the student’s best way of learning.
However, sometimes asking the student to think from a different point of view can be a very good thing. Ideally we want students to understand ideas and concepts inside-out, and a great way to develop this can be to ask students to use different methods to approach problems. All we have to do, as tutors, is ensure that we don’t abandon a student’s initial method, and make sure the student understands things in the way that they want to, before asking them to consider alternative methods.