High-impact tutoring is often provided by novice educators, many of whom lack formal training in education. These new tutors can feel overwhelmed by the numerous instructional strategies used by seasoned educators.
To focus their efforts and learning, tutors should begin their tutoring journey by focusing on high-leverage instructional strategies. The top three high-leverage strategies they should focus on are building positive relationships, choosing appropriate tasks for students,and using strategic questioning during tutorials.
Tutors can enhance their skills through self-reflection or through feedback from tutor coaches or artificial intelligence. The following actions align with each of the top three high-impact tutoring strategies. These strategies are designed to intentionally focus on elements within the tutors’ control, focusing on inputs rather than student-action outputs.
Build positive relationships
In The Science of Tutoring, Laurence Holt remarks that it’s logical in longer-term tutoring situations (weeks or months) for tutors to establish rapport with students, understand their interests and support their social-emotional needs. As with teacher-student relationships, positive relationships between tutors and students are essential to helping students build confidence and persistence in learning.
Tutors should employ routines to build a respectful culture, showing consideration for students’ humanity. They should engage students promptly at the start and close tutorial, leaving students feeling successful. They can create a joyful, engaging environment by modeling kindness and using time well. Through their body language, tone, and expressions, they can convey that students’ questions and opinions are important.
What does a positive relationship look like in practice? If you observe a high-quality tutoring session, you’ll see tutors who build positive relationships with students by greeting them by name and with genuine enthusiasm. Effective tutors start sessions on time and talk to students in a welcoming tone that makes them feel valued and understood. They ask about their students’ daily lives.
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If tutors work remotely, you’ll see effective tutors leaning forward, looking at the screen and showing excitement when students ask questions. You might hear them say, “Ooo, I love that question!” At the end of tutorials, tutors end on an optimistic note that helps tutors gauge students’ understanding of the day’s topic. Observers will hear these tutors ask students to summarize their learning for an absent student. Or, tutors might ask students to create two questions or problems on the topic they’re learning about.
Select appropriate tasks
Tutors should understand and internalize the content to facilitate learning with accuracy. They’ll choose tasks for students that allow for connected understanding, problem-solving and reasoning, and use grade-level tasks to accelerate student learning. And each part of their tutorial will have a clear purpose.
How might a tutor put these skills to work? First, they’ll spend time before the session making sure they are well-versed in the content, so they anticipate students’ questions and are alert to common misconceptions. If, for example, they’re working on building students’ stamina to persevere through word problems, they’ll have spent time before the session selecting slightly longer word problems than students can comfortably work through but not too much longer. This is one way they can align tasks with students’ current learning goals.
Effective tutors know why students will be engaged with specific content. For example, if they’re working on building up fractional skills and grade-level content of equations, tutors will select a few equations that involve fractions to build both skills simultaneously. Skilled tutors know that rote problems are boring and make students good at computation, not thinking.
Question strategically
The tutor’s role is to “orchestrate the session so that the student engages with the topic in a sustained way,” according to The Science of Tutoring. Questions are one of the most powerful tools for tutoring. Tutors can elevate their practice by using focusing questions to guide student thinking. Those prompts ask students to elaborate on their learning and explain their thinking. They’ll also use a balance of procedural and conceptual questions to assess student understanding. And they’ll give students enough time to collect their ideas before responding.
Tutors can help facilitate students’ learning by not doing too much of the work for them. These tutors are eager to get students to explain their thinking with questions like “Can you explain why you chose that method?” or “How do you know that?” Questions should be planned before the session to focus student thinking on the main concepts of the lesson.
While many aspects and skills go into providing quality instruction, tutors can significantly enhance the quality of their tutoring by prioritizing the three elements above. By prioritizing positive relationships with students and creating a joyful and engaging learning environment, selecting appropriate tasks that align with grade-level materials, and using strategic questioning techniques to assess student understanding and guide student thinking, tutors can improve the effectiveness of their tutorial sessions.
