8th February 2019 9:00
By Blue Tutors
It is bad for business, but a tutor should be trying to put themselves out of a job. Some people might argue that students can continue to benefit from a tutor throughout their education, from their first year in reception all the way through to university, but we think that’s an old fashioned view of tutoring. It certainly doesn’t address the reason most people look for a tutor in the first place.
There are lots of students who never use a tutor, and despite what some people might tell you, these students aren’t all struggling while their peers receiving tuition stretch away at school. The reason is that some students are simply good at learning by themselves, and this is ultimately the gift a tutor should be trying to give to a student.
Obviously very few people initially identify that they’re bad at learning. Most students request a tutor because they’re struggling at school or university and think that they need help with the specific topic on which they’re working. Some tutors react by trying to get students to learn by rote, just repeating exam style questions again and again and drilling the facts into the student. Whereas this might make the student seemingly better at the topic being studied, it doesn’t make them a better student.
Students who learn well do so by asking themselves the right questions, by thinking about the best way to approach the task in front of them and having the confidence to work at it. This involves a reasonable amount of trial and error because the initial approach won’t always be the correct one, but over time students develop a feeling for the best way to go about doing something.
The tutor’s role should be to ask questions which the student could ask themselves when their tutor isn’t there. The best questions contain no information at all; “how should we start?”, “what should we do next?”, “what does this mean?”. It’s amazing how quickly a student will progress when prompted in this way, and, of course, all the questions are are promptest encourage the student to continue.
We’re not saying that a tutor isn’t valuable, but over time the hope is that the student will realise that they tutor is simply a conduit to understanding, and it’s actually the student who is doing all of the work. Provided the tutor can imbue confidence and dedication, the student will begin to learn how to learn, and will no longer need their tutor.