29th December 2011 9:00
By Blue Tutors
We published an article recently about tutoring skill, and how it isn’t necessarily more prevalent in experienced tutors compared to young tutors. However, there is a skill which rapidly develops as one begins to tutor; planning and structuring lessons.
New tutors are often apprehensive about how to lead a lesson. They’re concerned that they may turn up at a student’s home, sit down with them, and not know how to begin teaching. This is an understandable fear, because tutors are imagining a tuition lesson to be like a lesson at school, where a teacher does have to carefully plan everything. This isn’t actually the case, and one-to-one lessons are often student lead, or it’s quickly very obvious what to work on.
One of the problems for tutors who are nervous about how to approach a lesson is that parents and students notice these nerves, and it doesn’t fill them with confidence. Even if the tutor is very good at teaching once he/she has something to teach, any hesitancy or signs that the tutor isn’t confident about how to proceed shows, and we find that the result is often for a parent to request a more experienced tutor.
There is a real benefit that comes from an experienced tutor who knows how to plan and structure lessons though, not just a perceived one because of an inexperienced tutor’s nerves. Experienced tutors often have pre-determined ways of working; they will create a rough plan after the first meeting with a student, and thereafter have an outline of the way in which each lesson should proceed. Of course, with private tuition it’s not possible to plan in the same way as a school teacher, because you have to tailor each lesson to the student’s needs, and react in a lesson if the student needs more help than anticipated.
So, it doesn’t take much for novice tutors to develop into great tutors, it’s just a question of controlling nerves, and communicating the structure of their lessons, and the tuition as a whole. Unfortunately this is a quite a difficult thing to do when one first starts tutoring, and can lead to a student losing faith in that tutor, even though the tutor may be doing brilliantly in every other aspect.