5th July 2019 9:00
By Blue Tutors
Homework might not be the first thing you think about when thinking about private tuition; tuition itself is out-of-school work for students, so should tutors be setting more homework on top of that? It’s a question often asked by new tutors, and once someone begins tutoring, it won’t be long before a parent asks them to set homework.
There are two things to consider when setting homework. The first is what the student intends to get from the lessons. If the tutoring is purely to supplement schoolwork it might be the case that the work given by the school is enough, and any extra work on top of this would be laborious and not helpful. Of course, the beauty of one-to-one tuition is to be able to tailor everything to the particular student, so a tutor could decide that a student needs more work on one topic and less on another, so could adjust the homework given by the student’s school.
In many cases tuition is not purely supplementary to schoolwork, and if a tutor is teaching something for the first time or reteaching something originally covered a while ago, it’s perfectly reasonable to set homework to ensure that the student has understood. The lesson itself should always be to develop understanding, but asking students to do work by themselves is the best way to test that they can replicate the work done collaboratively during tutoring.
Another important consideration is whether a student already has too much on their plate; there’s no point in setting homework which won’t be completed or will be rushed. As a tutor gets to know a student they get a feel for how hard the student works. It might be that homework is important to try and help the student to be more dedicated and do more outside of lessons, but when you know that a student is already very hard working, if they say that they really haven’t got time to do anything extra then not giving any homework might be a good thing.