11th August 2011 9:00
By Blue Tutors
Recently we reported on an article from Australia, where a student had complained that the amount of private tuition he received was hampering his ability to learn independently. Indeed, it’s a common criticism of the tuition industry; in a world where we want dynamic creative thinkers, is the increasing reliance on private tutors just creating students who can follow instructions perfectly, but struggle to overcome challenges without outside support?
This criticism is completely justified, and if you had met as many tutors as we have then your general impression of tutoring would be that a tutor sits down with a student, solves the student’s problem, explains how he/she solved the problem, asks the student whether he/she understands, waits for a nod of the head, and leaves.
Before we began directing tutors to our teaching guidelines before their assessment (when we stupidly thought that tutors need to discover how to teach without outside help), so many tutors fell in this category of ‘lecturing’ and asking the student whether they understand. Obviously this goes against everything we believe about good tutoring, and now we do our best to educate tutors to ensure that they don’t teach in a way that builds a student’s reliance on the tutor.
The purpose of our teaching guidelines is to help students to become better students, and not simply better at understanding what their tutor has told them. Obviously any lesson should mainly involve the tutor asking questions, and the student answering them (not the other way around), but we encourage tutors to make this clear to the student, to make it clear that all the tutor is doing is asking some very straightforward (hopefully non-leading) questions, questions which the student is perfectly capable fo asking when alone. The goal is to slowly remove oneself from the teaching process, helping the student to realise that all the tutor ever did was ask questions.
We really want to ensure as many tutors as possible begin to grasp this important facet of private tuition. Otherwise, as the Australian student says, we’ll just be creating a world where everyone relies on their tutor to do anything; better for Blue Tutors economically, but not better for our reputation.