Carl Rogers, 1902 -1987, was the founder of humanist psychology. He advocated that all people have an inner potential to find their way and to unlock their potential as long as they have the right supportive environment, and they are believed in. In a nutshell shell, all people have potential inside of them, they just need a supportive environment (which could be a person) to unlock it.

Rogers coined the term ‘unconditional positive regard’.

Unconditional: It means there are no conditions attached to how you view and respond to the person.  In terms of students, your intent to tutor them does not depend on their behaviour, ability, engagement, or their appreciation of what you do. Meaning, a student who says they hate your online lesson and will hang up when they feel like it, is treated in the same positive regard as a student who says they love your online lesson, and they can’t wait until the next one.

Positive: this means you have a positive approach to how you view the student. It doesn’t mean you need to like the student or mean that you are nice and polite to them (it often gets confused as this), it means you positively want to engage with them and have a firm belief that the student has potential. The student needs to feel they matter, and they need to experience that they and their education matters to you.

Regard: This is how you consider or think of the student. Your thinking about and feelings towards the student will always guide your behaviour towards them. You are human, so a lot of your behaviour will be out of your awareness, as it is for all of us. Even the most self-aware tutors on the planet will be driven by their inner beliefs and philosophy. All tutors from time to time, will need to stop and ask themselves why they are thinking what they are thinking and what causes their behaviour towards a student. How you think and feel about a student will always influence how you behave towards them.

Unconditional positive regard in the tutoring room:

Being motivated to give the student the best tutoring you can. You believe they matter, have potential, and deserve to have the best tutoring possible no matter what the student says or does in or out of the tutoring room. It is your philosophy rather than a belief you are forcing yourself to adopt.

This is obviously within reason, and we are not talking about violent or physically aggressive students.

Whilst you should employ unconditional positive regard with all students, there will be a certain group of students who will need it from you to a greater extent.

Students who have dyslexia, attachment issues, suffer from anxiety or have low self-esteem will often have very little positive regard for themselves. The students who struggle in school due to emotional and cognitive issues will often have no positive regard for their own abilities and they certainly won’t believe they have potential. Therefore, as the tutor, you must mentally hold that potential by believing in the student until you can prove to them that they matter and have a place in academia.

You have to see the best in the students as they will not be able to see the best in themselves

Be their champion, believe in their worth. Here it would be good to remind ourselves about the passion Rita Pierson’s has when it comes to being a child’s champion.

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Fill them up without enforcing fixed mindsets

What do we mean by filling a student up? In a nutshell we need to help students internalise positive thoughts and feeling about themselves. The thoughts and feelings need to come from you and be continually passed to the student until the student can think and feel the positive thoughts for themselves and become ingrained in their own self-belief system.

However, when we supply praise and positive validation to students, following Carol Dweck’s research, we need to ensure that we do not praise fixed traits:

• You’re clever.
• You’re intelligent.
• You’re perfect at this.

These are all fixed traits which can stop the student from trying to learn or trying something new as there is no room for movement from this fixed trait.

Instead, provide feedback and positive validation for all processes that are working well for the student:

You are working hard at spelling and look at how much you are improving.

You are really trying and that’s so great to see, look at how far you are coming.

When you started these lessons you weren’t sure about this topic, but now look at you. You stuck with it and you’re getting it.

Also, validate the student for their interests, their knowledge about things they are passionate about and validate them for all the positive decisions they are making within their world.

When a student leaves a lesson with you, they should leave feeling they are a valid individual, feeling good about themselves just for being them. Also, knowing that they can achieve anything they can set their minds to. They should begin to feel happy they are who they are and understand they are unique special individuals as we all are.

Highlight every achievement process

Ensure you highlight the learning at every opportunity. Instead of focusing on the outcome (what was right and what was wrong), focus on praising the positive steps the student is taking in their learning.

Praise their efforts and their commitment to the task. Every time they worked something out and stuck with their problem solving and had success, explicitly point this out and praise the student.

Always explicitly point out when a student has learned something within the lesson that they didn’t know before. Point out how they achieved this by sticking to the task and working it out. Praise the student not for knowing but for the process they used to get from unknowing to knowing. From not remembering to remembering.

Ensure every time they leave their lesson with you, they are leaving full to the brim with self-confidence and an awareness that they are capable of learning.