10th August 2018 9:00
By Blue Tutors
Most new tutors have an idea of what a one-to-one lesson is like. They will have explained things to their friends at school, and imagined what a typical lesson will be like. A lot of the time the tutors will have thought only about tutoring GCSE or tutoring A Level, even though they’re probably keen to tutor at other levels too. All of our experienced tutors will say that lessons seem very different with younger students, particularly those in primary school.
The question is, in what ways should a tutor teach differently with younger students? Some tutors argue that Tutoring Standards’ pedagogy doesn’t work with young students, but we think that’s just a misunderstanding of the ideas, and that the tutor has imagined the pedagogy within a certain context which has affected their interpretation whilst reading it.
A criticism with the pedagogy could be that, although the ideas themselves are abstract, the examples are necessarily concrete, and most of those examples come from secondary school topics. It’s important for tutors to read the ideas as abstract and apply them to the particular situation they find themselves in, rather than have a fixed notion of the practicalities of an idea which may not work with different age groups.
An example of applying the pedagogy differently is holding the space. With an A Level student this can mean asking a question and waiting patiently for the student to respond. The silence may last for 30 seconds or more, but this is fine provided that the student is thinking about the question and trying to understand it. For a 2 year old, holding the space is obviously not like this, but can be interpreted as not interrupting or helping the student while playing an educational game, such putting blocks through the correctly shaped holes. Obviously we don’t tutor many 2 year olds, but the point is valid; apply the abstract idea to the specific case.
We really encourage our tutors to read the pedagogy regularly, particularly before tutoring an unfamiliar subject or age. It helps so much to consider each idea in the context of the student you are tutoring, and think of your own examples for that student.