How to Make the Most of Tutoring

Student learning to make the most out of tutoring

So, you’ve decided to try tutoring. But are you making the most of it? Here are some tips to make sure you benefit from all that tutoring has to offer and are maximising progress in between lessons as much as within.

1.      Ask Questions

Tutoring is special because it provides a safe space to be curious, and that includes asking questions. Take the chance to ask when you don’t understand a topic, when you want to understand why an answer is correct or when you’re curious.

Pro tip: keep a notebook or document where you can write down any questions in between lessons, ready to ask next time.

2.      Make Mistakes (and Learn from Them)

Making mistakes is a fundamental part of learning. It’s in this zone that we get at the heart of what success looks like and emerge with a better understanding of how to get there. So, take the leap. It’s better to give an incorrect answer and arrive at the right one rather than stay quietly wondering.

3.      Use Feedback to Go Forward

Grades and scores can be a useful indication of where you are at in relation to your goals, but the downside is that they focus on where you are now rather than where you’re going. That’s why feedback is so important. It unlocks understanding of next steps, empowering you to visualise your next goal and get to your desired grade. Therefore, try not to fixate on the grade alone. Feedback includes not only your targets but what you have done well and also reminds you that performance isn’t fixed and progress is possible. So, always remember, it’s about where you’re going, not where you came from or are now.

Pro tip: always ask for feedback, not just a grade. If unsure, ask why you got the grade you did.

4.      Be Proactive

After every tutoring lesson, you’ll get resources attached to the lesson. Very quickly, they’ll be a ton of feedback and resources floating around, which is hardly helpful when you suddenly realise you need to remember what your target was for a topic you last studied a month ago. So, be proactive. Paste your feedback from each task into your Progress Tracker to log what you need to do and empower you to spot patterns: perhaps you keep losing marks on a particular question and so it’s time to acknowledge this, learn from it and try a new approach. Equally, you may be about to write a new essay and can’t remember where the guidance sheet was or what you’ve done with your quote flashcards. Get into the habit of creating folders on your device to organise your resources and you may want to print out key documents and stick them in a notebook. Having a tutoring notebook in lessons can also really help to record key notes and questions. Create a dedicated digital folder to save your tutoring homework in (clearly named!) and any marking work you receive.

Pro tip: organise your computer, notebooks and files. Use your Progress Tracker to keep all your feedback in one place and check it before starting any new task.

5.      Complete Regular Homework

I know that homework might seem a chore. It might also feel unmanageable because life is busy and you already have a lot of homework from school for various subjects that you’re juggling. Perhaps you also have a lot of extra-curricular activities. But in the long run, completing regular homework is super important if you’re going to achieve your goals. It ensures that you regularly practise key topics and tasks and provides further opportunities for you to grow through feedback. It’s also vital to understand that you should be regularly doing timed practise to prepare for exams—success takes time, and homework is a big part of it. Completing an answer under timed pressure is a separate skill, so it needs to be regularly practised. So, take a fresh look at your timetable. Where in your schedule could you complete tuition homework? Does a particular day or time of day suit you best? How can you work backwards from tests to plan what revision you’ll do when? Are there certain tasks you’ll need to do when you’re fresh and others that could be done when you’re a bit tired? Just remember, every piece of work completed now spreads out the workload and reduces pressure later on.

Pro tip: create an independent study timetable and chunk your time. Regularly review it to get the most of it. Make it work for you.

6.      Be Reflective and Resilient

Throughout our time tutoring, we will check in with how you’re feeling about your confidence and performance across various topics. It’s good to regularly check in with yourself about how you’re feeling about work you do in school, tutoring and at home to work out which areas are going well and what you need to prioritise extra work with. It can also help to think about why you find certain things difficult or aren’t progressing as this helps start the conversation about what needs to change.

Pro tip: use the end of each half term as a natural pause point. Note down what is going well, what you’re finding harder and what you’d like your goals to be for the next half term.

7.      Be Oraganised

There’s nothing worse than forgetting you had a tutoring session and missing out on valuable time or accidentally not leaving enough time to complete a homework task. Equally, if a lesson contained something useful that you think you’ll want to refer to then note it so you can re-watch the lesson for revision.

Pro tip: put reminders on your phone or calendar to remind you of key tasks and tutoring lessons so that you’re on top of your schedule and note down which lessons you may want to refer to again for revision. You could create a designated Word document that lists the dates of key sessions you may want to re-watch and note what was useful.

Are you ready to unlock the full power of tutoring?