22nd July 2010 9:00
By Blue Tutors
Tutoring is about asking questions, but also about asking the right questions. Obviously our teaching guidelines stress how important it is to elicit as much as possible when tutoring students, but a far more difficult thing to communicate is how and when to ask the right questions.
There is a popular idea that a tutor should only ask questions that a student can answer. However, whereas this statement is true to an extent, it’s also misleading if a tutor doesn’t fully understand what we’re trying to achieve when we tutor. A better way to put the statement is to say that a tutor should ask questions that their student can attempt to answer.
Why is this an important distinction? Well we don’t want students to find a lesson ‘easy’. That’s to say, we don’t want students to breeze through a lesson without needing to think about any difficult concepts. This can be done, and a tutor can very pedantically take a student through every small step to understanding, so that it’s virtually no effort for the student. The trouble is that this doesn’t teach the student anything; could they repeat the process for another concept? Or even repeat it for the same concept?
Having said all this, neither do we want a lesson to be so difficult for a student that it puts them off tuition, or off their subject. Almost every tutor has been in a situation where a student looks at them blanking, not just finding the question asked difficult, but having no clue where to start an answer.
A tutor has to create a framework for their student, communicating the context of the question, and the type of answer that’s expected. The feeling you want to create is one where a question is challenging, but attemptable, and where the student knows what steps to take to begin an answer. What we want is for the student to be thinking as deeply and intelligently as possible, whilst all the time knowing what’s expected of them, and that their tutor is there to help if it’s needed.