If you are tutoring a student who loves learning, wants to do well and is engaged to learn, trust and safety are less of an emotional issue and more of an academic issue. The student needs to have trust in you, that you know what you are meant to be doing, that you know your subject and have the skills and ability to take them to the highest marks or to help them meet their full potential.

For students like those above, feelings of trust and safety are a matter of trusting in your competence and your integrity.

However, there is another type of student, one who dislikes learning or who has been struggling to learn in a classroom for a while. These types of students will have different trust and safety needs. Your academic ability and your ability to tutor probably won’t enter their heads as something to be concerned about. Instead, these types of students are going to have a level of worry about whether you are going to make them feel bad when they are learning. Without even realising why they won’t engage, these students will be apprehensive about feeling safe, secure and seeing you as an adult that is trustable with their emotional responses to learning.

Paul is 10, he hates going to his tutor (Sally). There’s nothing wrong with her, she seems friendly and when his mum asks why he doesn’t want to go he doesn’t know what to say or how to explain it, so he just says he doesn’t like it. His mum makes him go believing it will be better in the long run.

Sally can see her student Paul is struggling. She tries to help him with his spelling using all the interventions she knows, but Paul doesn’t seem to try hard and just disengages as soon as he makes a mistake. After weeks of trying to make it fun, Sally just convinces herself Paul doesn’t want to try.

It’s not until Paul reaches adulthood when he one day recalls his tutor who tried to help him get better at spelling.

‘I think she wanted to help but I felt so miserable at the thought of going. I knew she would give me things to do where she could see how bad I was at spelling, and it crushed me. I felt completely worthless and stupid at the thought of trying. I don’t think my tutor knew that.’

What Paul needed was a conversation with his tutor. If Sally had spoken to Paul after seeing that he was struggling in the tutoring sessions and engaged with the elephant in the room, Sally would have established an emotional connection with Paul, and he could begin to trust that he could have a more positive experience with learning.

Sally: Are you okay Paul? It feels as if you would rather be somewhere else and that’s understandable. No one likes being somewhere if they don’t feel okay.

Paul: Shrugs and doesn’t say anything.

Sally: I was wondering how spelling makes you feel, maybe even just the thought of spelling?

Paul: Still looking at the table shrugs.

Sally: You know, I can imagine that if you’re a boy like you that can do all things you do easily, like football and cricket, then having to do the one thing that doesn’t feel easy must be hard. Perhaps it makes you feel rubbish? Dare I use the word ‘stupid’. Perhaps it’s easy to think that I might think you won’t ever be able to spell or aren’t clever enough. I can understand why you might feel like that, but it isn’t true.

Paul: Looks at his tutor, this curious lady who just read his mind and somehow made all those feelings and thoughts ok to have. She wasn’t cross or angry with him for not trying, it appears like she cares about me.

‘I don’t think I’m ever going to be able to do it… I hate it at school, I know everyone laughs at me. They think I’m dumb.’

Sally: Perhaps you think that I think you’re dumb?

Paul: I bet all the other kids you see can do it better than me.

Sally: That’s not true at all. All the kids who come here find it hard to write and spell when they first come. But it’s only me here and they get to know that I don’t judge them or think anything bad of them. I know it’s hard, but if we work on it bit by bit, it does get easier.

What do you say we give it a go, just for a little while and see if we can get there together?

What happened in this dialogue is that Sally stopped what she was doing and gently opened Paul up to his feelings about being there. She didn’t fall into his hopelessness and think the learning would never be possible, instead she connected to him and asked him if he was okay. She also made the connection about Paul and her being in it together. Sally didn’t dismiss Paul’s feelings about being dumb or stupid, as these feelings will not go away in one day. Instead, she helped Paul begin to understand that she wouldn’t judge him.

If you are not someone who has any practice at speaking to students this way, it may sound fluffy, or unnecessary. However, everyone has those initial fears of sounding odd when they first try, and then everyone is shocked by the responses they have from their students; how it changes the tutoring relationship and causes a more positive alignment.  If you don’t have a connecting conversation with a disengaged student there will always be the elephant in the room and your student will always pull back from every tutoring effort you make.

If you can connect with your student on a very basic emotional level about how they feel when they are learning the student will feel safe with you and trust you enough to try when they feel out of their comfort zone. In many ways you will be expanding their comfort zone.

Tutors who are avoidant or who do not know how to connect to the underlying feelings that are preventing students from engaging in tutoring sessions might seek to try and empower the student instead.

Sally: Paul, are you finding our sessions helpful?

Paul: nods unreassuringly

Sally: I was wondering if there was another way you would like to do the lessons?

Paul: Shrugs

Sally: Let’s try and think of ways of making it more fun.

Paul: Doesn’t engage.

We can see Sally’s attempts to engage Paul but, as he isn’t sure in how to articulate his feelings or explain why he hates spelling and why his tutoring makes him feel bad, (remember he likes Sally and doesn’t want to offend her) he feels extra pressure by her asking him how to improve the lessons.  Amongst all his overwhelming feelings, he is now feeling like he is supposed to know the answers or how to make the lessons better for the tutor.

Another way an unqualified tutor might try and help Paul is to engage by challenging his motivation or engagement as a way of confronting and changing his behaviours.

Sally: I know you don’t want to be here, but we need to work on your spelling to make it better. You don’t seem to be willing to try and do the lesson.

Paul: Shrugs

Sally: You need to work harder when you are here and join in okay?

With Paul’s underling feelings of worthlessness and fear of tutoring, this conversation is going to shut him down further. Paul would now have reason to blame his tutor as she sounded cross with him, he can now label her as not understanding and he would now have the reasoning he needs to tell his mum why he shouldn’t go. If his mum was wanting an understanding tutor (as most parents do), she will remove Paul from seeing Sally and take him to another tutor.

Over the years I have taken plenty of referrals from parents who describe a tutor their child was unhappy to see and they felt the tutor didn’t understand their child. Every time this gets examined further, the tutor had tried to challenge their child for not engaging in a behavioural rather than a connecting way.

Important

Whilst engaging on an emotional level is vital for all students, assuming that all students who see you will have difficult emotional issues with learning and engaging in connecting conversations at any opportunity will not be helpful if you are working with adolescents, many of whom will find this irritating. You should only engage in conversations when you are absolutely sure that the student is feeling bad in relation to their learning.

Signs of feeling bad inside can include:

• Looking away when it comes to answering a question
• Staring at the page / their work blankly
• Dropping tone of voice
• Tone of voice losing the range, becoming monotone
• Drooping sound levels at the end of sentences
• Not looking conformable
• Constantly looking at the clock
• Consistently not wanting to try questions
• Repeatedly saying I don’t know
• Withdrawn body language making themselves look smaller, hunched shoulders
• Looking down at the floor
• Dropped head

Other ways to establish trust and safety include:

Being consistent

If you are consistent with your students, they will begin to get a predicable model of what their tutoring sessions will be like. Being consistent means, you have the same energy to give to your lessons, you have the same motivation and quality to your tuition.

One day being energetic and creative, and the next lesson doing simple more engaging tasks doesn’t allow the student to have a predictable sense of how you will be when tutoring them. One week praising the students processes when completing questions (such as carol Dweck’s mindset theory) and then the next week only praising questions that are correct also sends mixed messages. Letting the student set the pace of the learning and then the next week pushing the student to go faster also means you are not being consistent. The list is endless. To enable students to trust you enough to feel safe, you have to be as consistent as possible with your approach and tutoring style.

Using humour

The use of humour is a sure fast way of building instant rapport with students. For some tutors well-timed humour will be easy, others will find it harder to use humour. Using humour, especially humour about yourself (self-deprecating humour) will build trust and rapport very easily.  It’s not putting yourself down, it is making the smile warm and sometimes laugh by you showing them you are not taking yourself too seriously.

Friendly tone of voice and facial expressions

Polyvagal theory is a complex theory that others course will cover. However, the basic premiss of Polyvagal theory is that when people are anxious their nervous system is detecting threats in their environment. This system, that is threat aware, is also connected to their facial expressions and speech production muscles. Additionally, we are hard wired to see blank facial expression and monotone voices as signs of threat. Thus, if we are with someone who is expressive with their vocal inflections and has warm tones in their voice (not monotone) it reduces any threat detection in us and supports us to engage with that person.

Being genuinely warm and interested in the student sat next to you

Very few tutors join the profession and not care about their students. However, it is easy to get too focused on the educational academic learning and overshadow any interest in the actual students.

What does the student next to you enjoy, how do they think, how do they respond to their perceived successes and how do they respond to their perceived failures? Have they told you about any hobbies? Do they have any ideas about what they want to do after school?

It is important to remember your professional boundaries and only pursue finding out more about your students if they seem willing to offer information about themselves. Some students will be incredibly private and won’t tell you about themselves, however many students will enjoy you knowing about them, especially younger students who will also be happy when their lesson topics are tailored to their interests. Such as writing Harry Potter maths questions for Harry Potter fans.