15th November 2019 15:10
By Blue Tutors
The skill of being a good tutor is obviously not one which we would say is easy, nor is it something which many people are naturally good at from day one, certainly not if they haven’t been taught how to tutor. However, being good at tutoring can be an incredibly helpful skill in lots of other jobs, or even just in daily life. Lots of people are great tutors all the time, and don’t realise that what they’re doing is tutoring.
A job like sports coaching prepares someone well to be a tutor, but that’s still a form of teaching and isn’t seen as so dissimilar. Doctors often tell us like interviewing a patient has many parallels with tutoring which may be more surprising. Medical staff are taught to ask clear open questions and allow patients to talk so as not to influence the responses, and Tutoring Standards’ pedagogy says much the same.
There is a much more general way in which one to one teaching plays a part in virtually everyone’s working life. Anyone who is made responsible to ensure that a colleague does their job correctly is taking on the same role as a tutor. It’s not about how good a communicator you are, whether you can explain well, whether you can find a different way to communicate (although all those things can help), it’s about creating a situation where your “student” understands how to do what is required without you overseeing what they’re doing.
Good managers make good tutors and vice versa. Everyone has a friend who moans about work because their boss doesn’t give them any freedom and there is no licence to make mistakes. Good tutors allow students to follow their own thought process but at the same time provide the support to ensure they stay on track, and choose the right time to ask a question which helps the student to understand even better than before. Whenever we explain this so many people say “oh wow, that’s what I do at work!”