Are you a seasoned tutor or new to the world of tutoring? Tutoring is a great responsibility but can also be an extremely rewarding experience especially when your students succeed under your tutelage.
If you aspire to become a great tutor, just know this – successful tutors are defined by their ability to routinely improve students’ academic performance and increasing students’ self-efficacy. Sounds simple enough, doesn’t it?
However, the question remains: What does it take to be a great tutor?
It has been proven time and time again with SmileTutor that having the best qualifications or the most knowledge about a particular subject doesn’t mean that one will make an excellent tutor.
The process of becoming an excellent tutor in Singapore takes knowledge, persistent effort, experience, kindness, interpersonal skills, and most importantly – a burning resolve to continually improve your craft.
Build a Strong Personal Relationship with Your Student
The main reason parents and educators recommend private tutoring is because as a private tutor, you have the opportunity to build a personal relationship with the student due to the proximity of your interactions – something that school teachers might not have the time or chance to.
Connecting with the student, creating respect and trust, and fostering a personal relationship have shown to be extremely beneficial and essential for the student to learn better and be more motivated. In fact, a recent study on tutoring revealed that 96% of students whose tutor builds a robust and personalized relationship were more likely to complete their homework.
Building a strong personal relationship is the key to coaching success.
Use a Personalized Approach to Private Tutoring
In school classes, each teacher is assigned to up to 40 students and the main focus in schools is curriculum coverage. However, each student is different and what works for one may not work for another. To help kids and students reach their full potential, educators have to assess each student’s needs and goals individually.
As a private tutor, you get to listen and spend time understanding a student’s weaknesses, adapting to the learner’s strength, incorporating personalized teaching method and engaging students’ interests.
For instance, the pace of teaching should be appropriately rigorous and challenging enough, but not so tight that it frustrates the student and cause them to stop trying. The pace can be adjusted and adapted according to visible growth signs of a student’s academic progress.
This personalized approach to each student is unique to private tutoring and is something that schools cannot offer. Working one on one with a student is immensely gratifying, both for the tutor and the tutee.
Use this to your advantage by providing something that their school teacher cannot in your quest to become a great private tutor in Singapore.
Communicate Early and Often With Parents
A key factor how successful you can become as a tutor depends on your ability to communicate early and often with parents.
How many times have potentially great tutors been terminated just because of a slight miscommunication or misunderstanding, especially in the early stages of a tuition arrangement?
Working with concerned Singaporean parents requires heavy effort put into communication and collaboration with students’ parents.
Moreover, co-creating personalized learning plans involving the parent – who are the key influencers in students’ lifestyles – will help you to map a better plan for accountability and success.
Help Your Students Plan and Set Goals
Tutors who help student to plan, set goals and create benchmarks set their students up for academic success and progress.
When a student has a specific goal, such as mastering basic algebra or memorizing differentiation formulae, they will have a clear idea of what is expected of them within a set period and can thus take ownership of their learning process – by ensuring they practice and learn on their own to hit the target.
Having goals and learning milestones also make the journey easier as goals create a destination. Most students are pressurized and daunted by the rigorous curriculum. By breaking it down into smaller goals, students can stay motivated and have a clearer sense of direction.
Inculcate the Joy and Habit of Lifelong Learning
A lot of students are never truly motivated to learn on their own simply because they do not see or understand the true meaning and purpose of learning.
A great tutor should help students adopt the right mentality – that learning is not a chore or a temporary activity but rather a lifestyle and lifelong habit.
Truly successful tutors not just have academic content expertise and knowledge of the subject – they are also experts in making their teachings relevant to students’ interest by introducing and discussing real-life applications to academic content.
The best tutors, educators, and teachers acknowledge the significance of being lifelong learners.
The Beauty of Private Tutoring
In a nutshell, great private tutors cater lesson to the student’s individual learning styles, keep the knowledge fresh, has excellent interpersonal and communication skills, motivates well, and continually looks at creative ways to promote the tutoring experience.
Private tutoring in Singapore fills a niche that can’t be filled in by schools. Students still need personalized tutoring to fully understand various subjects and for intensive preparation for end-semester and national examinations like PSLE, O-level, and A-levels.
Thus, the number of students learning from private tutors continues to grow in Singapore
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