6th September 2019 9:00
By Blue Tutors
We’ve been putting together a small brochure recently for students and parents to find out a bit more about us and how we can help them, and when garnering opinion about it, particularly from people not so familiar with the tuition industry, we found something interesting. The use of the word pedagogy was questioned a few times because it’s not common for someone to know what it means.
When we interview tutors we ask them about Tutoring Standards pedagogy, the tutoring approach we ask all of tutors to use. Obviously recruiting Oxbridge graduates means that many of our prospective tutors are familiar with the term due to an interest in education, or if they don’t know what pedagogy means, they immediately look it up. However, few people are certain about the way to pronounce the word, which shows how rarely it is used.
Is this interesting? We think so, because we’re all so familiar with close synonyms for a “teacher’; tutor, coach, mentor, but the most important thing to know about these roles is the pedagogy they follow. Being a good tutor isn’t necessarily determined by the philosophy behind one’s method, but it has a massive effect, and we find it strange that we’re not asked more about our pedagogy by our students or their parents.
Parents very often ask about a tutor’s experience, or say that they want a qualified teacher to tutor their child. We understand why, students want to feel like they’re in safe hands and the idea of someone with experience and who knows the curriculum inside out gives that security. The trouble is that incredibly experienced qualified teachers can be bad tutors because they don’t follow a tutoring specific pedagogy, and someone with no experience can be amazing because they understand the tutoring method and stick to it.