Every parent wants their child to do well in school and that’s why majority of them would prefer to enroll their child for extra tuition classes.
For this reason, private tutoring has become a booming business but is your child getting the best of what they need. If you are considering hiring a tutor, here are five tips to keep in mind.
1. Identify your goal
Are you trying to pass a test or a class? Or are you actually trying to learn something?
If all you want to do is pass a test or a class or get some other short-term result and be done with it, that’s a performance goal. However, if you want to actually understand an idea and be able to transfer it to different situations, that’s a learning goal.
While parents may have both performance and learning goals for their children, in general, learning should be placed above performance. Learning will lead to better performance, but it will happen at its own pace.
If you decide to use tutoring to achieve a performance goal, be aware of the pitfalls. If a student needs excessive test prep to pass a class or get into a program or college, the student may be set up for failure in whatever comes next.
2. Look carefully at the tutor’s actions
Good tutoring is not just the tutor teaching the student. In order for tutoring to be effective, students should be actively involved in the process, not just sitting silently while the tutor talks.
Here are a few things to listen for when a tutor is working with a student:
If the student does something right, does the tutor always say “Good!” and move on? Or does the tutor sometimes ask follow-up questions to check thinking? It’s better when there are follow-up questions, because sometimes students draw conclusions that help get answers correct on the current type of problem but then cause mistakes on the next types.
If the student makes a mistake, does the tutor say, “No, do it this way”? Or does the tutor say, “Tell me why you made that choice”? Getting the student to explain their choice enables the tutor to gain more insight into how the student goes about solving problems and to catch any errors in the student’s thinking.
Does the tutor help the student practice how to deal with confusion and mistakes? Students learn the most when they make a mistake and recognize that they made one. A good tutor will not intervene to prevent the mistake, but rather allows the mistake to happen and then helps the student to identify and fix it. This approach teaches skills the student can use when the tutor is no longer there.
3. Don’t forget free options
Before parents jump straight to paid tutoring services, it would be beneficial to explore free options.
Free options include after school help from classroom teachers, peer tutoring programs at school, professional tutoring from outside companies the school pays to come in after school or on weekends and tutoring programs in city libraries and community centers.
Paid options include one-on-one tutoring, small group tutoring and online tutoring. These options are offered by both tutoring companies that hire many tutors and individuals such as college students and teachers.
The adage that “you get what you pay for” does not necessarily apply to tutoring. Volunteer or peer tutoring can be very effective. Price does not predict effectiveness.
4. Do things on your own at home
If your child struggles with reading, read to your child, with your child and in front of your child. This applies whether you have young children or older children. Let them see you reading books, magazines and online. Foster a love of reading and a sense that reading is a regular activity in your home.
If your child struggles with English or writing, you can help by using a wide variety of words when you speak to them, including words they don’t yet know. If parents are not strong in English, they can still teach their children to speak, read and write in their native language, and they can always transfer those skills to English with the help of their teachers. Research shows that children benefit from first learning to read and write in the language in which they think.
If your child struggles with maths, find ways to do maths with your child in enjoyable ways like games or apps. Interestingly, working on math with your child benefits them even more if you are anxious about math yourself.
5. Keep expectations reasonable
There is no guarantee that tutoring will pay off.
While tutoring is generally more likely to benefit a student than not, research on tutoring is contradictory because there are so many factors at play. And too much time spent on tutoring can actually have a negative effect on students.