Top Tips for Student Tutors

By Elizabeth Hilfrank on June 25, 2017

Student tutoring is a highly sought after job in the college world. It offers competitive pay and flexible hours, looks great on a resume, and you get to talk about something that you already know a lot about. Sounds like the dream.

The problem is that so many people want to tutor — how do you make sure you get the call first?

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Here are some tips that will have you standing out from the rest.

Middlebury College recently conducted a survey with students in regards to their peer language tutors. The results showed that the tutees took patience, encouragement, availability, and creativity in explanation to be the most valuable characteristics of a tutor.

Patience is crucial to success as a student tutor. If someone is struggling with a subject, he is probably already pretty frustrated. So, the last thing he wants to see is another person getting frustrated over his own confusion. You have a scheduled time with this person, so you should not be rushing through in an attempt to get out early.

Related to patience is the aspect of being aware of your own unconscious gestures.

Pennsylvania State University writes in its tutor manual:

“Be wary of actions like fidgeting in your seat, shaking your legs under the table, biting your nails, touching your hair, fiddling with your ring or earrings or constantly glancing at your watch. Not only are these gestures distracting, they also give the impression that you are nervous, not confident, uninterested, or in a hurry to get the session over with.”

A tutee will notice the gestures you may not even know you’re making, and it will hurt your reputation.

Encouragement will also go a long way in your tutor prestige. Reverse the situation, and place yourself as the tutee. If you finally figured out a concept you had been struggling with, you would want to know it was worth something, right? So, show your student that you care that he succeeds.

Availability is crucial if you want to be a top tutor. The point of being a tutor is to help others, not yourself. So, make time for the students you are trying to help. Be there for them and try to follow their class syllabus, so you know if a big test or paper is coming soon. Being available will make the student have more faith in you and confidence in your abilities.

Creativity in explanation is arguably the most important factor to tutoring, and it is the top factor that will set you apart from the rest. Nearly every tutoring handbook mentions it.

What do I mean by creativity in explanation? Well, not everyone learns the same way. In fact, this may be just the reason someone has sought out a tutor. He may not be able to follow the way his teacher teaches. So, it’s important for you to have a deep bag of tricks in your back pocket in case how you learned something does not exactly work for someone else.

As Pennsylvania State University student-athlete, business, and Spanish tutor Danielle Metzger writes, “change the style, not the kid.”

This fact has a direct correlation with another tip.

Be a good listener. You aren’t going to know how to teach someone unless you know what the problem is. Make sure you understand what they don’t understand so that you can cater to their needs. Never assume. Listening instead of dictating will also help them to verbally work through the problems.

So after you listen, collaborate. While tutees may be frustrated at first that you will not deliver them answers on a silver platter, they will thank you later. Work with the student to learn the concepts, and make sure they aren’t just “yessing” you. Ask “why” and probe the student to explain further in order to decipher if he truly knows the concepts.

“When someone’s sitting in front of me looking like a bobble head doll after I explain something (depending what it is — Spanish and accounting have to be tutored differently), I’ll ask them to explain it back to me to see how much they’re actually retaining. Sometimes they sincerely think that they know it and don’t realize that they don’t until they try to talk about it. It helps to see how they think about things too, because then you can understand what they don’t understand,” Metzger writes.

In the Harcourt Brace Guide to Peer Tutoring, Toni-Lee Caposella writes:

“In American culture, as well as several others, there is a natural tendency to learn from the same age-group. Many people feel more comfortable working with and asking questions of others in their same peer group because there is less of a power dynamic; the distinction between teacher and student is less pronounced.”

The above quote leads to the final big tip to bring you to the top tutor list: your attitude matters. Personality will go a long way in tutoring, so be personable! Be animated. You don’t want the student to think he is boring you, and you don’t want to bore the student. Act like you want to be there.

Think before you speak. Careful of what you say; you don’t want the student to feel bad for not knowing something that came easy to you, and you don’t want them to think that their capacity has been reached with one accomplishment. Encourage further learning. Be relaxed. Don’t act like you are a professor because you’re not. You don’t want to scare the student, and you want him to be comfortable speaking with you. Be confident. The student will only trust you if he thinks you know what you are talking about. So, show that you know what you are doing!

“A student’s own attitude plays a huge role in how well they do, but as a tutor, your effectiveness is really only 20 percent what you can teach them and 80 percent what you say while doing it,” Metzger states.

While these guidelines may seem heavy, they are not complicated. The old saying, “treat others the way you want to be treated” fits perfectly in the realm of student tutoring. Be positive, be confident, be prepared, and be available, and you are sure to soon be a top tier tutor.

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