29th June 2018 9:00
By Blue Tutors
All of our tutors know that we push Tutoring Standards’ pedagogy as much as we can. We really want our tutors to teach according to it, and we encourage our students and their parents to read it to understand the tutoring method, which can seem a little strange if one hasn’t been taught in that way before.
The pedagogy is deliberately abstract; Tutoring Standards have written something which applies to any type of one-to-one tuition. Obviously pedagogies can be less abstract and include caveats referring to specific subjects and levels of tutoring, but the message is probably stronger when in a short document which is easy for tutors to remember.
Something many tutors say when they first read the pedagogy is that they can see how it applies to one subject, but question how well it applies to another subject (invariably their own specialist subject). This is really interesting, and we think it’s because, when you know a subject so well, you’re reading the pedagogy only thinking about that subject and some ideas don’t seem to fit. For example, mathematicians often reference the part about opinions which applies less to maths, and English graduates often say that learning goals are more difficult to set when having a discussion.
Although the pedagogy is short, it’s not straightforward, and does require some contemplation about how each of the ideas apply to different subjects. When someone thinks that an idea doesn’t ‘fit’ their specialism, it’s usually because more time is needed to relate the idea to that particular subject, or because the tutor has tutored before without obeying that idea, and takes some convincing to change.