6th March 2020 14:46
By Blue Tutors
A major difference between regulated and unregulated industries is the freedom for those in the industry to do things in their own way. On one hand this can be a good thing to challenge accepted opinions and innovate, but there are also pitfalls when someone is operating in a detrimental way believing they are doing good.
Private tuition suffers from non-regulation, and it’s frustrating to hear stories about tutors who really aren’t helping. Some are straightforward, where a tutor is literally teaching something which is incorrect, but parents are becoming more savvy about that now, and don’t employ tutors who aren’t experts in their subject.
A more current problem is well qualified and experienced tutors who resist changing their tutoring method based on little more than their own subjective opinion on why it works. One of our main reasons for supporting Tutoring Standards’ pedagogy is their objective reasoning for why it works, and because so many tutors support what they say.
During our tutor interviews we ask for opinion on the pedagogy and secondly what the tutor thinks makes them a good tutor. The idea is to encourage analysis of a widely respected method as well as their own. However, some tutors turn the first question into the second, or, in feedback after the interview, say that they wished they could have spoken for longer about their own method and not Tutoring Standards’ pedagogy.
Some tutors tell us that they like to lecture for 5 minutes before asking questions. Some say they wait for students to ask questions, or that they’re good at reading body language to identify when a student doesn’t understand. Nothing is necessarily wrong, and may work for some students, but we know that lots of those things don’t work for everyone.
It’s great for tutors to make lessons their own and put their own stamp on them, but we’d love everyone to be a but more thoughtful about how to assess their tutoring ability. Something “feeling right” does not mean that it’s working, and tutors should consider that, when doing something where there is no clear authority on how to operate, trying different methods and talking with other experienced tutors might help to see things from another angle.