As a tutor, your income highly depends on the tuition rates that you charge and the classes that you take up.
This means that your tutoring schedule is terribly important and having a disorganised schedule can cause your routines to be messy and stressful.
Read on for the three simple rules that you must abide by to ensure that you don’t make mistakes in organising your tutoring schedule:
1) Make sure that you set breaks in between your classes
Since tutoring is a freelance job with no fixed limits to your working hours, you might be tempted to fill in as many classes as you can to help more students or earn more. But this might be counter-effective.
These are the benefits of setting aside extra time for breaks in your schedule:
Preventing Burnouts
Being a tutor is a mentally taxing job that requires a lot of energy, planning, and patience. You need to have ample time in between to recharge to take care of your mental health and prevent burnouts. If you overwork yourself, you wouldn’t be able to perform well in your classes either.
After a class, give yourself a break for however long you think you may need and take the time to really just relax and not think about work for a while.
Apart from having breaks in between classes, you should also try to fix off day(s) every week whereby you don’t take any classes for that day and focus on recharging.
Keeping a rest day for yourself will recharge your batteries and keep you going in the long run.
Preparing for your next classes
Once you feel that you are truly well-rested, you can even use the remaining time to prepare for your next lessons so that they can flow smoothly.
Avoid having to rush
You also need to set aside extra time for transport to your next class so that you eliminate the possibility of being late for your classes.
Rushing can bring about more stress and anxiety for you.
2) Adjust your fees according to the demand and quality of your lessons
You may have received feedback that your tutoring is effective, your students are improving their grades with your help, and they are referring more students to you.
Your schedule is beginning to fill up and you realise that you may have too many students to take.
When this happens, it would not be feasible for you to continue to take up just any student with your initial rates.
If you have to invest more time into preparing better lesson plans and materials to improve your quality of lessons, you need to reimburse your time spent and charge your lessons accordingly.
Aside from the obvious fact that you’re charging more for the high value that you can bring as a tutor, it is also to ensure that you’re not taking too many students, more than you can handle.
However, it is ethical to avoid raising the fees abruptly for your older students as it might not be within their capability to go beyond the initial agreed amount
You can either:
– Give them time to look for a new tutor within their budget, or;
– Continue charging the same rate for your older students, but begin to charge higher rates for your incoming students.
3) Combine students who need less help
If you’re not specialising in 1-to-1 tuition, you can consider grouping the more independent students together.
Some students sign up for tuition classes not because they are weak in the subject, but rather because they just want to keep up with the practice, continue improving and secure their good grades.
Such students are probably more independent in their work and don’t need as much assistance all the time. You can teach more than one of them at once so that you’re making better use of your time; while one student works on the problems, you can teach the other student.
Conclusion
It takes conscious effort and set boundaries to ensure that your tutoring schedule remains organised for your tutoring career to go smoothly.
If you haven’t already, try following the three above rules that I’ve mentioned above and let me know in the comments below if they’ve made your tutoring life better!
Want more tutors’ career advice? Read our other articles here.
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