7th September 2018 9:00
By Blue Tutors
Something we hear all the time from parents is that they would like their tutor to be a current or ex school teacher. On the face of it this sense; teachers have to be familiar with the syllabus and obviously, unless they have just started teaching, have a lot of experience preparing students for exams. However, there are a lot of subtleties which are missed in this request, and it’s important for parents to realise that the tutoring method is very different from classroom teaching; something emphasised in Tutoring Standards’ Pedagogy.
Over the years we have watched thousands of tutors give lessons, and something almost all the best tutors have in common is that they want to learn and improve their tutoring skill. We’ve met totally inexperienced tutors who are naturally gifted at tutoring; for whatever reason they just seem so comfortable with the tutoring method. On the other hand, we’ve met tutors who aren’t great at the start but are dedicated to improving, and with intelligence and hard work, these tutors don’t take long to become very effective.
The only problem we ever see is when a tutor is not interested in changing. A minority of tutors we have met want to teach in the way they always have, and because they are proud of their teaching experience, it creates a barrier to improvement. It is not always the case, but these tutors tend to be lecturers or classroom teachers. Both of those styles of teaching require a reasonable amount of talking at groups of students, which is definitely not the way to tutor.
An additional problem is that students and/or their parents are not aware of what tutoring should be like. Why would they be? And so a tutor who speaks for 5 minutes and seems knowledgable and experienced can convince someone that the lessons are effective. The sad thing is that as long as the student doesn’t realise that the lessons aren’t helping, they will continue and no one will be motivated to change.
We always promote tutoring skill over experience. Experience is great, and we are very respectful of it, but it needs to be allied with good tutoring. Hours and hours of lecturing or classroom teaching does not help students in a one-to-one situation.