28th December 2011 9:00
By Blue Tutors
The owner of a tuition agency in the US says she has had a revelation about the way to train her tutors to teach. Alexandra Mayzler, who owns Thinking Caps Tutoring, began by training her tutors one-to-one, but has the company grew she found it easier to conduct the training in classroom style lessons, where tutors were asked to listen to a lecture on the policies and procedures of the agency, including ways to effectively structure their lessons.
The revelation for Alexandra was to realise that there should be no difference between the way she asks her tutors to teach, and the way she teaches the tutors herself; she felt it was completely contradictory to preach one style of tutoring, and not obey the same rules when she is the tutor. Mayzler said “I’d kept thinking of staff as one entity and students as another, but at the end of the day we’re all students”.
Since Alexandra realised what she should change, she has been developing an improved tutor training programme with one of her experienced tutors. She has dropped the staid ‘lecture-style’ training that she used before, and has put aside half of the next three months to focus on a better way to train tutors. Her plan is to ensure that the training is interactive, and to use small groups to recreate the scenarios that occur in actual lessons.