1st April 2010 9:00
By Blue Tutors
Why is it that so many people choose to find a private tutor? There is definitely a common acknowledgment that one-to-one teaching is much more effective than lessons where students are in groups. Moreover, in Oxford and Cambridge, the two universities regarded as the best in the country, the strength is their teaching, which is done one-to-one, or with two students to one teacher.
An obvious answer to why one-to-one teaching is more effective is simply because it allows a tutor to devote more time to an individual student; in a class of 25, a teacher only spends 1/25 of the lesson time, on average, with each student. However, is the effectiveness of tuition solely due to increased attention from a tutor? And is there ever a time when lessons can be more effective when there is more than one student in the class?
The astute among you may have noticed the ‘on average’ in the above paragraph, and realised how much this supports the argument for one-to-one lessons. It’s likely that a teacher will spend more time with struggling students than others. A positive result of this is that hopefully it will bring those struggling students up to the level of the better students in the class, but what about the students who aren’t struggling? Is it fair that they get a disproportionate amount of attention from their teacher, and develop less quickly than they would otherwise? Having a tutor completely resolves this problem, because the lesson is pitched at the perfect level for the student. There is no concern about stunting a student’s growth, and tuition allows them to achieve their full potential.
However, there is an argument to suggest that sometimes group teaching can be more effective than one-to-one tuition. For example, when teaching languages, many tutors say that it can help to have two students in a lesson, because they can practise with each other. Similarly when teaching a discursive topic, students can debate something with someone at their own level. Obviously a good tutor will give a student confidence, and encourage individual thought, but this isn’t a substitute for speaking to their peers. This is why it can work so well for a student to be tutored as a supplement to their schooling, because they get the best of both worlds.