22nd December 2011 9:00
By Blue Tutors
At Blue Tutors we proudly tell prospective tutors that they do not need any formal teaching experience to apply to be a tutor with us. We realised very early on that more experienced tutors didn’t necessarily perform better at our teaching assessment than inexperienced tutors. In fact, there appears to be only a small correlation between experience and teaching ability.
It’s crazy how often we’re asked by students to provide a tutor with so many years of school teaching experience. Maybe not crazy, we understand that parents are very anxious about getting the best possible tuition for their children, and finding a school teacher to tutor them provides a feeling of assurance; they’re using a tried and tested provider of education.
The irony is that, because of the role a school teacher must provide, it is often people in other careers that find they have been trained to teach one-to-one in a much more effective way. A teacher must stand in front of a group of students, provide them with the information to do a question, and mark that question afterwards. This isn’t one-to-one teaching.
If we consider a doctor’s role, they must ask a patient questions to ascertain the symptoms, and then use the responses to decide what the problem is. The important aspect of this is to ensure that the doctor’s questions are simple to understand, and don’t lead the student. For example, rather than ask if someone’s neck hurts, the doctor will ask whether a patient has any other pain. This is a crucial aspect of tuition, because we want students to answer questions genuinely, and not be led to a correct answer by their tutor.
We also find that sports coaches are very natural tutors. The reason for this is that when teaching physical techniques the coach may speak to their students, but to confirm that the students are performing properly, the coach will ultimately observe what they do and if they do something correctly it shows that the lesson has been understood. There is always a danger when tutoring that the tutor will go through an explanation, but then not the observation; the tutor will assume that the student has understood without observing the student performing correctly. Sports coaches tend not to do this.
So, although we’re always very respectful of any teaching experience a tutor has, we’re not in the habit of placing a hierarchy on types of experience. Lots of different careers provide tutors will skills that make them a good tutor, and it’s not true that a teacher is always more adept with these skills than people in other walks of life.