4th May 2018 9:00
By Blue Tutors
We meet so many young tutors who say that they don’t have any ‘formal’ teaching experience but have experience in areas like sports coaching and instrumental tuition, and think that because these aren’t ‘academic’ they’re really applicable to working as a tutor. The funny thing is that the skills developed by coaching a sport or teaching an instrument are far more applicable to tutoring than teaching a classroom full of students.
The mantra of the way in which we ask our tutors to teach is to ensure that the student’s responses demonstrate understanding. This is incredibly difficult for a classroom teacher because it’s not really possible to check the responses of so many students in a one hour lesson. Moreover, some tutors teach like they’re in a classroom; simply lecturing for a few minutes before asking “do you understand?” and moving on if they get an affirmative response. This is the equivalent of a tennis coach asking if her student can hit a forehand correctly and then not watching the student do it, or a piano teacher asking if his student can play a piece and then not listening to it.
This idea seems ridiculous: asking a sports person or a musician whether they can do something and not watching them ‘perform’. This is a brilliant lesson for a tutor though. The classroom teacher can’t check whether all of the students in the classroom can perform, but the tutor can, and treating a one-to-one tuition lesson more like a performance can really help us tutor in the right way.