When people are asked what a boundary is, it’s common for them to think of a physical partition between two spaces, such as a garden wall or fence.  It is something that marks where one physical place ends and the other begins. So how do psychological boundaries work, where there are no physical spaces? Why are they important, especially in one-to-one tutoring?

Psychological boundaries are very similar to physical boundaries. They separate one space from another. However, instead of being concerned with physical spaces, we are talking about mental and emotional spaces. Our thoughts, feelings and beliefs. These types of boundaries help form our sense of self, who we are and what we believe. These boundaries are also about knowing or marking where you end, and another person starts. It’s a sensitive line between people in all types of relationships.

In terms of tutoring, if we think about learning in general, it is a psychological activity. We are talking about cognitive functions such as understanding, linking concepts, thinking, making connections and memory. If we do not give children enough mental space and a boundary for that space, we might be stopping the learning without meaning to.

If you have ever worked with children who have low confidence, low self-esteem, dyslexia, maths phobias or general school avoidance, you will see that learning is also an emotional activity. It has personal hopes and fears intertwined within the success and failures. It is important to know where the tutor’s hopes and fears end and the student’s begins.

Without boundaries people can feel like they are losing parts of themselves; their ideas, their values their needs and wants. It is very common for adults to feel uncertain unless there are boundaries. Children, on the other hand, can become anxious, withdrawn or act out. If you are accidentally crossing a child’s boundary when you are tutoring them, you will see acting out behaviour, fiddling (when they don’t normally) moving reading material, putting their face close to the work so they can’t read or write. There will be multiple signs of the child showing you they are unhappy.

As we can see crossing someone’s psychological boundaries can cause psychological harm and distress. Due to what we have said about learning being a psychological activity, crossing psychological boundaries will also hamper a person’s learning and, in most cases, shut the learning opportunities down.

The three types of boundaries we need  in the tutoring role

1. Intrapersonal
2. Interpersonal
3. Types of relationships

Intrapersonal Boundaries 

Intra means within. So, when we talk about Intrapersonal boundaries, we are talking about the boundaries inside ourselves. Our sense of self in our own minds. It’s all to do with our self-concept, whether that’s subconscious or conscious. Note, when we say subconscious, we mean things that we are not consciously aware of or have never thought about.

Intrapersonal boundaries are the boundaries of our own ideas, how we analyse, how we reflect and how we appreciate something. Our intrapersonal worlds can be split into three sections:

Self-concept

Perception

Expectation

When we talk of our self-concept, we are talking about the view of our self as we see it. Our self-concept is made up of our beliefs, values and attitudes.

When we talk about perception, this is based on our beliefs, values and our attitudes as well, but these become active and help us understand the world we see around us. Our perception is how we make sense of the outside world. People’s perceptions differ because very often this self-concept differs between people.

When we talk of expectations, we are talking about future-orientated messages. These are messages that we send out. A bit like having party planners plan the party before we get there. Expectations sort of plan how all events and situations will be. So, it’s a sort of subtle prediction about how things might be, most people do not know they are even doing it. Some Psychologists call these life scripts. We will talk more about expectations in another chapter.

So why are intrapersonal boundaries important if they are just within our own minds?  The answer to this common question concerns the relationship between what we think of ourselves and the relationships we have with others. Psychologists have known for a very long time that how you experience yourself in your interpersonal world, directly influences how you will experience and respond to others.

The main way of strengthening and maintaining your intrapersonal boundaries is to practice self-empathy. In terms of the self, we mean the self that lives in your intrapersonal world. So, it’s connecting to what is going on inside of you, it’s tuning into your own judgments, your own beliefs and your own basic fears and hopes. When a person can tune into themselves this way, they are able to know and own their own thoughts and feelings. Some psychologists call this owning your own stuff.

Interpersonal Boundaries 

Inter means between or within. Interpersonal communication is the way people share information, feelings and meanings through verbal and non-verbal communication.

Verbal communication involves the words you say to a student to tutor them. Whereas the non-verbal communication are the facial expressions, body language, tone of speech, eye contact and mannerisms. Your non-verbal communication always gives away your attitudes, beliefs, bias and judgements. It will say more about who you are as a person and will create more of an impression within the person listening to you, rather than the actual words you say.

As a tutor, interpersonal skills are one of our greatest assets. It’s how you communicate the knowledge and learning to a student, it’s how you build relationships with students and their families.

The whole purpose of interpersonal communication is to create a type of message that comes from you and into the other person. The other person, for the purpose of this course, we will call the receiver.  Whether it’s a student, parent or someone in your organisation, they are all receivers of information.

Interpersonal communication requires the receiver to create meaning. This meaning is based on their own mental process once they have heard and processed the message. This meaning creates a personal understanding within the receiver. Good interpersonal communication enables the person sending the message and the receiver to share the same meanings. However, it is very easy for two people to end up with different meanings.

Let’s have a look at how that happens…

It’s all to do with noise or interference in the message that is being sent.  In other courses, we will look deeper at the noise and interference that can disrupt communication. However, for this course, we will just look at how you, as the sender of the message, can have (without meaning to) noise and interference in the delivery of the message. We will also notice where boundaries are important to reduce noise and messages.

Physical noise– this is where the tutoring might be taking place in a noisy place or an environment that is too distracting for the child.

Physiological noise – Trying to tutor a child when hungry, overly tired or stressed, being overworked or the setting being the wrong temperature will be difficult. All of these factors can create interference with how you communicate interpersonally and creates unwanted noise in the message you are trying to send.

Psychological noise – Biases, prejudice, assumptions personal likes or dislikes and judgements. This is where you must know yourself as a tutor to see what biases and judgements you might be bringing to a tutoring session. For example, you may not be fully consciously aware, but you might have longstanding family belief that people who are very rich don’t have to work hard and get everything given to them. Or you might think that people who are poor have wasted life opportunities. None of these are solid truths, and are very exaggerated biases, but to hold a subconscious judgement like that will mean you are at risk of tutoring differently in the different types of houses you may go to. Our own biases are hard to detect as the are the fabric of our personal experiences, family and cultural backgrounds. We all have biases, the more of your own biases you can detect, that are educationally related, the less these biases can play a part in your tutoring.

Semantic noise – when the tutor who is tutoring and the student receiving the message has their own version of the meaning.  This could be caused by a differing understanding of the words used or too much terminology.

Individual responses – The way the messages can be interpreted based on personal factors that are not shared. Such as past experiences, fears, preferences bias and assumptions.

Shared individual fields. This is where there is an assumption that things such as past experiences will be shared. For example, the shared experiences and values of education, the shared views on whether learning is innate and is dictated by intelligence or where learning is seen as skills to be practised. These variations in experiences of education will filter the messages you send to the owner of these experiences.

If you assume that students, parents and colleagues have the same shared individual fields, you may struggle to see the individual differences and your interpersonal communication will struggle to send clear understood messages and meanings. Similarly,  even if people do have similar individual fields as you, there will always be some individual elements. So we must always be mindful that the person who you are talking to will have their own individual responses, and it’s your job to make sure you manipulate your messages to ones that can be understood by the receiver as much as possible.

Types of relationships 

This is the professional aspect. It’s how you conduct yourself. It’s the way you behave and the way you act. It is what you think is appropriate, it’s how you negotiate your needs and your needs of your students and their parents. Moreover, it’s how you view and conduct the tutoring role differently to being a parent, friend, teacher, social worker, counsellor or family member. It’s how you integrate the organisational requirements into your working professional world.

Finally, It’s all about what you say to the children and how you say it. it’s how you verbally and non-verbally respond to what the child and client say, does and how they act. It’s how you write your reports and how you respond in emails.

Setting boundaries

Setting boundaries will involve you as a tutor setting the expectations and parameters of a session. Sometimes setting a boundary can be saying no to something, this might feel counter-intuitive and rejecting.

For instance,  a child comes for a session with you and brings their homework.If you were to work with the child on the extra homework set, (i.e. the actual questions) this would be professional boundary violation. The teacher who set the homework wants to see what the child can do. If the tutor did the homework with the child, the teacher will be marking the success of the session, rather than the child’s ability when left alone to do a task.

This type of boundary setting can cause frustration and the boundaries can sometimes feel counter-intuitive. Meaning the boundary being set isn’t one that immediately feels like it is helping the child feel safe and secure.

However, boundaries like this foster growth, and it comes back to your interpersonal skills and your professional skills in how you avoid this professional boundary-crossing. How you set the boundary is just as important about as the boundary itself.  If you did it with skill, the child will feel respected, validated and safe. We cover how to deal with this scenario later.

Some other interpersonal boundary violations can easily happen because the tutor wants to do their best to help a child.  Most tutors want to help children do better at school. To help them feel more confident, to be able to integrate better in the classroom, or to pass exams and have more opportunity.

So what happens if a child is brought for tuition by their parent/guardian at the start of the session and its clear the child does not want tuition?

Here is the conflict for most tutors: They are adults with more life experience, they know not passing exams has a knock-on effect in life. The tutor may also have experiences of switching a child on to learning and then seeing the child ‘want’ to learn more. The tutor has a belief that if the child keeps going, they will get more from it and you just need to get through the tough bit first.

If the tutor ploughs through the session trying to coerce the child, probably without realising they will have exerted their adult power over the child and risk upsetting the child’s mental boundaries. The tutor will have imposed their thoughts, values, opinions and beliefs onto the child without knowing they are.

However, we as educators do know the importance of education on a child’s future and how it can open doors for a child, or at least give them choices. So, if we do not try to engage a child, are we then denying them or withholding?

We will look at this scenario later when examining power in the tutoring relationship.