24th January 2020 14:49
By Blue Tutors
Talking to new tutors we often tell them how helpful sports coaching can be to understand the tutoring method. It’s important to watch your students perform, not just ask them if they know how to perform, and trust that they can. There is another aspect of sports coaching, however, which demonstrates a trap we can all fall into when tutoring, which is joining in with the players, and neglecting the reason you’re there.
Any college captain at Oxford or Cambridge will tell you that trying to coach and organise a team while also playing is a nightmare. With the benefit of hindsight it’s obvious that you’re not really coaching when you’re playing, but of course there are no other options; not many colleges employ coaches for each of their sports teams. Having said that, even professional coaches are known to join in sometimes, just for a bit of fun. And that’s the thing, we do it because we enjoy it.
The analogy with tutoring is all too clear. Most tutors love their subject and they’ve chosen to tutor it to keep that love alive. Suddenly the tutor realises that tutoring is very different from learning and it’s the student’s pace which is important, and the student should be doing most of the work. That doesn’t stop a tutor from getting involved, though. It is so difficult to sit patiently with someone and watch them go through something and resist the temptation to do some of the work which you know you enjoy. Every tutor has had the experience of looking back at a lesson and kicking him/herself when realising how much of the writing was done by them.
It’s not wrong for a tutor to love their subject. In fact, when choosing a tutor it’s something you should definitely look for because only then will the tutor enthuse the student. We want all our tutors to understand this and work on suppressing their tendency to “join in”. You can’y play and coach, and you can’t study and teach.