Improve your Tutoring Skills
Introduction
Tutoring is a responsible role and you should only consider becoming a tutor if you have a genuine passion for the subject and want to share it with your students. In addition, you must have good planning and interpersonal skills and relate well with young people
What do students (and others) expect of a tutor?
- You need to clearly establish what the student, and his or her family expects of you, and what they consider to be the purpose of the tutorials.
- You also need to have a clear idea of your own strengths and limitations and what skills or knowledge you can offer as a tutor.
- It’s useful to discuss this as early as possible. Try to narrow this down to objectives regarding specific content or study methods to be taught.
- It should then be easier for you to evaluate your success (and help your student see his / her own success).
- You also have “professional” obligations as a tutor. These include being punctual, reliable and well prepared.
Administrative considerations
Clarify the details of your employment as soon as you can, preferably before the first session. This will help to avoid any potentially embarrassing situations that could arise later. Issues to be clarified include:
- Scheduling: What is an appropriate time for tutoring? Will it be at the same time each week?
- Cost: What is the cost per session? How and when is payment to be made? Weekly, after the session, or monthly? Cash or cheque?
- Location: Where will the tutoring take place? (Preferably somewhere quiet away from the rest of the family).
- Length of Employment: How long is tutoring to continue? Is this a one off session for a specific assignment, for a term, for the academic year?
- Mutual obligations: What is the protocol if either party needs to cancel the session at short notice?
Practical Teaching Tips:
Use Questions to Enhance Teaching
Questioning can be useful to establish rapport, build confidence, find what a student knows or to share experiences. Recognise and use different types of questions:
Closed questions can be useful for finding out information, and can provide of structure to a situation, but they can result in a yes/no answer that leaves you none the wiser. The following questions are all closed questions that are likely to receive a negative, or defensive, reply.
- Can’t you do this exercise?
- Have you finished all the homework I gave you?
- You must know how to do logs!
- Haven’t you done referencing!
Open-ended questions: the use of open ended questioning techniques to get students to reflect on their own work, can assist students to improve their understanding and become more independent learners. Some examples:
- Instead of “Haven’t you done your homework yet?” how about “What’s the homework situation?”
- “You’re really good at long division, how do you feel about multiplication?”
Questions need to be asked at an appropriate level. Easy questions may be considered patronising and questions that are too difficult may be threatening.
Lack of response to a question may indicate poor phrasing of the question, rather than a lack of understanding on the student’s part. If in doubt, try rephrasing the question.
- Allow an adequate time for a student to respond to a question, even if this involves an awkward period of silence, rather than jumping in and providing the answer. A big part of your role as a tutor is listening to the student.
- Encourage him or her to talk about their knowledge and study issues.
- Finally, respond warmly, naturally and positively to all student answers. If a response is inadequate, it may be possible to praise part of the answer while also indicating sections that need further elaboration or correction.
- Students should also feel comfortable to ask questions. A two-way dialogue is indicative of a positive relationship between the tutor and student.
Assist Learning by demonstrating skills
Provide styles of thinking, analytical and critical reading, argumentation or problem solving in your field. This can include:
- modelling ways of presenting material, eg. structure of an essay, method of setting out a problem
- different writing styles e.g. reflective and personal vs analytical and
- different types of evidence e.g. an example to illustrate a point vs. reference to a primary source.
- the use of vocabulary specific to the subject. e.g. irony, satire
- discuss appropriate referencing procedures e.g. footnotes, Harvard system, how to incorporate references into text.
Provide Quality Feedback and evaluation
All students gain from continual evaluation, from the general “well done”; “that’s great”; “you’re really good at that” to the specific “that paragraph was very effective”; “good choice of words”; “you have a prodigious knowledge of place value!”
Make regular checks of your student’s performance against the objectives you have set. e.g. improved writing skills, knowledge of topics, or problem solving abilities. If the student’s parents are paying the bills, it’s also important you provide this feedback to parents also (with your student’s permission).
It’s also essential to monitor and evaluate your own performance as a tutor. Students expect:
- clear statements of what they are expected to achieve.
- constructive feedback on their work and how it can be improved.
- respect for their ideas and efforts
- encouragement and reassurance
- critical constructive advice, with respect for their feelings
You should now begin to plan your tutoring session.