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One-to-one tuition, also known as private tutoring, is a popular educational practice that provides individualized instruction to students. In this article, we will explore the benefits of one-to-one tuition and how it can help students.
Even experienced tutors can struggle when starting to deliver sessions in schools. Tutoring in school means being particularly mindful of how your sessions fit into a student’s school life and tailoring your approach accordingly. This sounds easy enough in theory, but what does it mean in practice?
This week, we’re looking at one-to-one tutoring. In a traditional class setting that students will be accustomed to from their time spent learning at school, it can be difficult to get the personal attention that is often required to meet the student's needs.
Large class sizes and often under-resourced faculty make learning and intimate class time stretched during school hours. Each student will have their own needs when it comes to their respective learning objectives. When it comes to getting direction on where to focus their future development and addressing their areas of weakness on a given topic, one-to-one time with a teacher is imperative.
The one-on-one interaction between a teacher and a student benefits both parties involved. The material, speed, and structure may all be adjusted to fit the needs of any learner. This is in contrast to the traditional classroom setting where all students must learn at the teacher's pace.
This often leaves students learning at a pace that is far too slow for their liking and some struggle to keep up and need a great deal of assistance in learning the respective material.
A ‘one size fits all’ approach certainly isn’t an optimal approach when it comes to the learning of the students. In a one-one setting, the teacher gives the student their full attention, which is beneficial to the student. The teacher can pay attention, take notes, and assess the learner's level of abilities, knowledge, and attitudes.
Effective listening should be carried out by both students and teachers. This is the optimal way for students to learn and can be far more effective than spending hours in a class of over thirty students.
Since there are no mixed abilities to contend with, the teacher can create levels of difficulty that are suitable for the learner in front of them. The objectives may be jointly agreed upon and clearly defined in advance. Both parties' planning and preparation can be effectively used in this interaction.
The teacher can modify their approach to fit the learner's learning preferences and their own individual requirements in the given subject. In such a meeting, it is much easier to establish rapport and, as a result, have the freedom to explore and evaluate attitudes and talents.
We’ve compiled a list of the main things tutors should definitely be doing when they work one-to-one in schools.
Connecting Sessions to Classwork
It’s all too easy for progress made in tutoring sessions to stay in tutoring sessions. Consistently, evidence shows that tutoring interventions are more effective when they’re meaningfully connected to students’ regular lessons – allowing them to feel the benefit of the additional work when they’re back in the classroom.
This is particularly important to remember for tutors in schools, where students can feel particularly disorientated by contrasting approaches to a subject. They might be told in their lesson to use one approach for a certain problem, only to have that contradicted in their tutoring session.
What to do? Who to trust? Maybe their tutor wants to cover a different topic altogether – something they’ve not come across yet that won’t be covered in lessons for a few weeks. Will they feel that progress back in the classroom?
Building a relationship with the teaching staff of the appropriate department is something tutors who work in schools should do. Knowing what was discussed in your student's most recent session and what will be in their upcoming one is crucial. Luckily, schools will work to a syllabus, which means that same syllabus can be shared with you, and provide you with an opportunity to build your tuition specifically to your student's needs.
What approach is the teacher taking if the subject is challenging? Spend some time getting used to it before the session if you are unfamiliar. The effectiveness of your sessions will be greatly enhanced in both the short and long terms by making sure your method is meaningfully connected to the course material.
Personalising Topics
The best place to start if you are looking to make your one-to-one tutoring sessions more effective for the students that you are teaching is to improve your understanding of what your students’ needs are.
Finding the precise topics that need additional practice for each student is the first step in effective personalised tutoring. On top of that, the very best tutors are able to come up with a number of solutions and answers to help students with their thought processes and even add things like divergent thinking to their repertoire.
The great power of one-to-one tuition is the personalisation of content. When working with just one student at a time, every topic can be approached with that student’s experience and personal difficulties in mind. This is the mechanism that makes one-to-one sessions so impactful, with students able to make meaningful progress much quicker than they might be used to.
When working in schools, the particular topics, resources or methods to be covered might come from the teaching staff. Whilst this is a really important aspect of in-school tuition, it shouldn’t cause tutors to forget to personalise teaching for each student.
Students frequently recognise the difficulty of a subject or concept and have no idea why they find it confusing. Being effective. Unlike a classroom’s rigid curriculum, tutors pay close attention to each student's unique needs and will develop a tailored strategy that will work best for them.
You can even set some metrics for how you are going to track their progress to that you can be sure that their goals are met in the given subject or skill. You may be employed to work with a student who currently hasn't got the right level of results for the courses they want to attend in the future. Tailoring their education can help to ensure they get the results needed to take the next step in education.
Learn About Students
Take the time to get to know your tutees – what are their hobbies? What subjects do they like best? Which of the fundamentals of this subject have they never felt comfortable with? Start every session with a warm-up to see how they’re feeling today and ground every task in something that connects to your student.
This can be achieved by handing out forms to be completed prior to your tutoring sessions so that you are instantly enlightened about what their ability is in the respective subject as well as their ambitions and areas of weakness. These are invaluable considerations for tutors when preparing for the sessions.
An understanding of these three considerations will help the tutor to tailor the sessions according to the specific student so that the class is optimal for the learning of the respective student. You might also find success in spending your first session with the student discussing this with the students. It is important that you are both on the same page if you are going to ensure that their learning objectives are going to be met down the line.
Since one-on-one tutors may accommodate a family's schedule and tutoring requirements, this customised design also takes into account the frequency and flexibility of tutoring sessions.
A good tutor will adapt their teaching style to the student in order to capitalise on their strengths and address their areas of weakness. Whether your goal is to help a student to be more creative, or to perform better in subjects like maths and science, build the rapport first. You should also consider how you are offering the material from your lessons and if they align with the learning style of your student (visual, auditory, reading, writing, kinaesthetic).
We know that building a rapport is so crucial with students:
Balance "Friendly" With "Focused"
How to balance a fun environment with serious instruction is one of the questions we are frequently asked during training sessions.
It's all too simple for untrained tutors to adopt a "matey" attitude in the beginning of lessons, which results in behavioural problems after a few sessions. Alternatively, they could overthink the situation, come off as too strict in the first hour, and alienate their pupil. Here is what we advise.
You might think that you can get the most out of your students if you work them like cogs in a machine and have them write out notes all through class and send them home with hours of homework.
This might yield positive results in the short run, though it is likely that your students will burn out or it can even negatively influence their attitude towards the subject.
Remember that you have an obligation to be warm, kind, friendly and supportive. Don’t try to take a stern or disciplinary approach – it’s just not what you’re there to do. However, your student knows the rules and so should you.
If you encourage rule-breaking in your sessions (think lateness, bad language, etc.) it’s no longer clear where the line is, which can lead to small losses of control down the line.
Teaching should be a give-take relationship, if you expect your students to make an effort both insider and outside of the classroom then you will need to lead by example and go above and beyond for your students. Above all, honour your commitments. If you promise that something will happen if your students succeed then it must.
Your students will understand that, despite how pleasant you are, they should be treated seriously and that, in the end, what you say is final as long as you stay within that bounds. So if they accomplish the learning outcomes that you had set at the beginning of the year, you should reward them for their efforts.
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