The first lesson is always the golden lesson as it is where you will make the biggest impressionable impact. For many clients the first session is a trial session. This means the clients are testing the waters to see if you can establish a relationship with the student and also testing the waters with their own expectations of what they will want from you longer term.

While this may seem a very difficult task, the client’s expectations and needs have a common pattern: Initially, clients want to know that the tutor can establish a relationship with the student so the student they are paying for will want to return to future lessons.

Once this relationship is established, the client then moves their criteria and expectations onto your ability to tutor their student in what they want them to learn.

So, the golden lesson is where you need to build a relationship with the student, make the student want to come back and have you as their tutor and you can hint to the parent that you understand their problem and have skills that you can apply moving forward.

What are the client’s problems that they need you and the organisation you work for to solve?

We have talked about what the client is looking for continually through this course. I hope by now you see that if you do not meet the clients’ requirements, they may end the tuition (often abruptly) or request a new tutor.

With younger students, clients mainly want their students to have help with specific skills, such as spelling, reading and the foundations of maths. These clients have tried to do homework at home or worked with their student at some point and are aware that foundations are missing in order for their student to do the level of work that is being set at school.

Occasionally, at Westcountry SEN we have tutors who go through their specific skills training (such as spelling) and have struggled with attaining the skills to drill down and help with the fundamental skills. Thus, these tutors will see the spelling as a sort of 5-minute side-line task and continue to tutor with subject tuition such as sentence construction within general literacy or story writing. Worse still, a tutor may write a report or tell the client that their students spelling isn’t that bad, thus telling the client that their problems (and they) are not valid.

Ultimately, the client feels they have been ignored and their needs are not met. For some clients they may feel guilty about asking for help with a certain problem again, some may feel angry and upset. However, all clients will react by ending the tuition and looking for someone else who can help with their problem.

Use the requested tuition information

Use the requested tuition information to show the clients within your first session that you understand their problem and have the skills to help. Your lesson feedback (notably reports) that go to the client must reflect your willingness to help the client solve their problems.

The Golden lesson: Engaging a student

As well as meeting the client’s needs, you need to make a positive impression on your students, so they are happy (and even look forward to) seeing you again.

Tips for first engagement with students and where inexperienced tutors go wrong.

• Show the student how you are going to make them feel in the lessons. Don’t tell them

Inexperienced tutors, or tutors who are not used to engaging with students in a relational way, tend to tell the student about themselves or about how they understand how the student is struggling at school.  Or they may start with questions about what the student wants to do with their studies, future goals and try and find out about how the student feels about school.  This is all too much too soon.

The first session is not a question-and-answer session and the 1:1 nature of the tuition may feel overwhelming if you are expecting students to tell you very personal details about themselves at the offset.

Your student is just trying to work out if you are going to be an annoying adult or not. They do not want to talk about themselves right at the very start. You should have enough information from the initial assessment to start without needing to ask any of your own questions. You need to take the time to learn about your students and not rush to know everything in the first session.

Some tutors will take a ‘let me tell you about me approach’ this approach is often well meaning but it creates the risk of the student feeling like they have to listen all about a tutor that they would now rather not be sat next to or meeting online for the first time. The ‘let me tell you about me approach’ will switch off all unmotivated learners or make anxious learners feel overwhelmed.

The trick is to show the student who you are, without telling them. Show them that you won’t get cross if they make mistake, show them that you have patience, show them that you want to understand how they think, show them you want to make your session fun and interesting. Don’t tell them.

Everything you let your student experience will be remembered and thought about. Everything you tell your student will push them further away.

The golden rule: Don’t tell the student how things are going to be, show them when any situations or opportunities arise.

• Are you expecting your student to look up to you and respect you too soon?

This section concerns self-disclosure. Self-disclosure, telling a student details about yourself that makes you more relatable, is a powerful tool. However, it is only powerful when the student sees you as a role model or someone worth listening to. Remember we covered this in the working with vulnerability lesson too.

Just say you’re working with a student who gets anxious when they face algebra. You listen and are containing however; you desperately want to tell the student that you too thought maths was terrifying when you were at school. You know it might help the student to know they are not the only one and now you can do algebra, you can show the student that they too can do it. However, timing is the key.  Remember what we discussed in the listening lesson? It is better to hold back and use your memories that come to understand the student’s feelings.

Holding back is something you should try and do as much as possible at the start to listen to your student.

You need to already have a connected relationship for modelling and self-disclosure to have the effect you want it to have. You need to wait until the student has learnt to respect you, not accidently expect too soon.

This is true especially for teenage students, they are separating from their parents and caregivers, trying to find their identity and independence. The last thing they want, or need is another adult expecting them to care and listen when they talk about themselves.

Adults who talk at students without having an established relationship that is based on connection first, tend to shut the student down. The potential for relating gets eroded and the student either disengages or uses politeness in place of a real genuine connection. To enable a student to be vulnerable and open, the students need to have a space in which to do so. Don’t be the biggest person in the room or unintentionally make the conversations about you.

Further down the line, when the student has experienced achieving algebra with your help over and over again and is mastering more complicated algebra, that’s the point to tell the student you used to be frighted of algebra too. The respect for you as a tutor will already be there. Self-disclosure on top of respect and connection is a powerful tool, just give your student time. It will take many lessons before that respect is earnt.

• Disguise assessments

As a tutor you will need to do your own assessment to gauge where a student is academically. However, you need to assess your student within the context of forging a good connection and good working relationship.

Using a list of boring assessment tasks or undertaking an initial test to see where your student is academically might be the easiest way to see what your student is struggling with but what impression will you be making and how will your student be feeling at the end of the lesson?

Whatever assessment you want to undertake, how can you make it age-appropriately fun? Let’s say you are trying a few maths sums to see where the student is. How will you make it fun and engaging with younger students, how will you enable older students to know that you don’t want to catch them out, you don’t want to make them look silly, you just want to see where they are. How can you make any initial assessment relaxed, engaging and ensure the student feels safe? You need the student to be vulnerable and show you what they can do, how will you show (not tell) the student they are safe enough to be brave.

Other courses cover the easement process and how to assess where a student is. As for this course, just consciously focusing on the initial impression you are making upon a student will help you tailor the assessment and initial learning discovery, and thus making it more engaging and fun for the student.

• End of sessions

Lesson endings are vitally important. The ending needs to be organised to enable the student to leave their time with you with feelings of achievement and bit by bit meeting their potential.

Lessons should have a particular rhythm. Starting with a problem / idea / teaching point the student needs help with. At the start the student will be very much in the ‘I don’t know’ place.

The middle bit is helping them achieve the core skills and micro skills to help them grasp the problem / gain conceptual understanding. The student moves from the ‘I don’t know place’ into the ‘perhaps I can know’ place.

The last 10 minutes should be the student achieving the problem, mastering whatever was worked on that day. The focus should be on what was achieved, what went well, how hard the student worked and containing as much positivity as possible. The student moves from the ‘perhaps I can know’ place to the ‘I know I can do it and I did it’ place.

You should do everything you can to avoid starting a new topic or new step of problems that run the risk of the student ending the lesson back in the ‘I don’t know’ or ‘perhaps I can know’ place.

This is where less is more. It is better to cover less work initially but gain more positive feelings regarding their academic ability than it is to cover too much and have less positive academic feelings. The more times a student leaves with the ‘I know I can do it and I did it’ feeling, the more they will internalise that feeling, and their self-efficacy will dramatically improve.

 

• Do everything you can to avoid seeking validation from your student

Make sure the focus at the end of the session is on the student, rather than on you. This might sound very hard and critical, but it is incredibly easy to seek validation from a student that the lessons are going in the right direction by trying to encourage the student to say if they enjoyed the lesson or if you taught them well.

Not seeking validation might be one of the hardest things about tutoring, but tutors who can hold back and make the learning all about praising the student and showing them where they started the session (what they were stuck with) and where they ended (what they can now do), will have more impact and foster faster learning from their student.

Make your place, your needs, and your value in the tutoring relationship secondary as much as you can. The more you can help your student grow, the more emotional rewards you can gain from the student achieving and the stronger the tutoring relationship will be.

How does the student feel at the end of the lesson? – this is how they will remember you and it will shape what they think about the tutoring they are receiving