3rd June 2010 9:00
By Blue Tutors
The tutoring guidelines on the Blue Tutors website are very... well, mechanical. They don’t take into account more subjective qualities that a tutor can bring to their lesson which can improve a student’s learning process. This is obviously deliberate – you can’t instruct a tutor to do something when you can’t be objective about it – and while it allows tutors the freedom to ‘personalise’ their tutoring, it might suggest that there are occasions when a tutor shouldn’t follow the guidelines; occasions when doing something different is better for a lesson.
The feeling of doing it ‘my way’ grows the more tutoring a tutor does. As a tutor begins to get good results, and receives praise from their students they will begin to feel that they’re a good tutor. Of course, they probably are a good tutor, but it’s important to realise that the reason for that may be exactly because they have followed the Blue Tutors guidelines so well.
A tutor can have a great deal of freedom while still following the guidelines, and the better tutors realise that the guidelines still fit their best lessons, even though they still bring their own personality and enthusiasm.
However, what we have to guard against is thinking something like ‘I don’t need to check understanding here, I’m pretty sure the student has understood’. As soon as you fall into the trap of thinking that you can use a student’s body language to assess understanding, or as the student to judge their own understanding, you miss the fundamental principle for our teaching ideas.
Our tutoring guidelines are not there to help an experienced tutor to teach well while they’re learning, but for all tutors to follow at all times to ensure that they’re tutoring as effectively as possible. Many fantastic, experienced tutors sometimes catch themselves deviating from our guidelines, and quickly realise that they’re not doing the best for their student.