17th July 2013 9:00
By Blue Tutors
At Blue Tutors, while we’re very proud of our tutor assessment system and our ability to measure a tutor’s ability to develop understanding, we’re also very aware that the system has its limitations. In theory we shouldn’t have to worry about much more than a tutor’s teaching skill, but in practice there are lots of other factors that affect how successful a tutor becomes. One such is a tutor’s first impression and general personality, and we can judge that from an assessment, but most other criteria are not so easy to assess.
The best way to describe the qualities which we can’t immediately assess is ‘professionalism’. A, sometimes overlooked, aspect of the assessment is the ability to arrive promptly at a certain venue; an incredibly important part of a tutor’s day-to-day work. If someone is persistently late, or cancels lessons, then they will quickly find students rejecting their services. However, prospective tutors tend to place more value on punctuality for an interview than for most other appointments, and we’ve found that being on time for an assessment does not necessarily guarantee a lack of tardiness in future.
A sense of responsibility might seem too obvious to mention, but you’d be surprised at how many tutors appear to care very little about the commitment made to a student. A very common problem is for a tutor to decide to stop tutoring all of their students around March/April, citing the need to study for their own exams as the reason. Sometimes we can pick this out in our discussion after an assessment, because a tutor’s questions occasionally indicate that they’re looking to teach as many lessons as possible at certain times, but want the freedom to stop teaching whenever they decide to.
The most important quality which we hope each tutor will have is honesty. We spend 90% of our time dealing with a small fraction of dishonest tutors, and not only is that frustrating for us, the dishonesty, if clear to a student, really can harm the goodwill between us. However, again at an assessment there is no test of honesty. It is a very difficult thing to test until a tutor has a reason to be dishonest.
We have focussed on teaching ability to recruit tutors until now, and generally it’s a pretty good policy, because we have a certain degree of certainty about how impressed a student will be when a Blue Tutor turns up at their door. However, the sort of person a tutor is makes the difference between a few lessons before an exam, and 2 years of weekly lessons. It’s probably better for a tutor to be a good person who needs to improve their tutoring skills, rather than a bad person who’s a brilliant tutor. The second person is unlikely to turn into a good person, while the good person will always be keen to improve as a tutor.