17th January 2020 15:03
By Blue Tutors
We never miss an opportunity to extoll the virtues of Tutoring Standards’ pedagogy. It has become the proven way to tutor and not only can we see the difference it makes when our tutors adhere to it, but every experienced tutor, teacher or professor who joins us tells us how nice it is to read such a clear succinct document on the correct way to tutor.
We ask our tutors to regularly take an assessment with Tutoring Standards to continually develop their skills, and every so often we come across someone who doesn’t pass and takes issue with the objective way in which they’re assessed. In our experience the criticism tends to be that the assessment doesn’t take into account the softer subjective skills that can be so important for a tutor.
The irony is that we would never ask our tutors to take an assessment where the grading wasn’t objective. We think that every assessing body needs clear criteria which they will use to judge their candidates, otherwise it would be the case that an individual would be giving a subjective judgement on how good a tutor is, which would gold no value for us. Moreover, two different assessors might give differing judgements.
Tutoring Standards tell tutors that their more human qualities shouldn’t be overlooked, but that they must be used in conjunction with their objective pedagogy, not in place of it. Obviously this makes sense, but tutors are usually very proud of what they do, and so a fallback when not passing an assessment is to argue that they are a good tutor because of their human qualities.
We have met incredibly personable tutors who aren’t good at tutoring, and also tutors who find personal interaction difficult and awkward but tutor very very well. The latter type are definitely more helpful for students, but the former type tend to to be thought of more favourably because of the impression they give off.