|
Tutors spend a great deal of their time giving feedback to students on their academic performance and the quality of their work – but how often are the roles reversed?
A recent report from the Department for Children, Schools and Families highlighted the fact that 93 per cent of tutoring agencies in the United Kingdom use some form of ongoing performance assessment but that many tutors place no great emphasis on this aspect of their work.
In addition one of the most consistent findings of recent Ofsted reports is that assessment does not sufficiently inform learning and teaching. We need to increase this area if we are to effectively help children and young people to really achieve their best.
The majority of feedback that private tutors receive comes from parents but taking the time to listen to the opinions of your students can be a mutually beneficial experience that greatly enriches the learning process.
One of the most important factors underpinning successful outcomes from extra tuition is the one-to-one dynamic between tutor and student, and giving learners a genuine chance to appraise tuition structures can help to build a sense of trust and understanding.
Building trust through feedback
Asking a student to give some kind of all-inclusive written or verbal assessment of your tutoring sessions can also provide you with important information on how to get the best out of them, by allowing you to understand better how your students work, what kind of environment they feel most comfortable in and why they work the way they do.
A tutor might approach the topic by asking a learner what their favourite part of their extra tuition lessons are or how they think lessons could be improved. Then once a general theme has been established you can move on to a wider discussion of how they feel about your lessons.
Using assessment can help children with less commitment explore ways that they feel might make lessons more appealing and help you pinpoint ideas that you can implement to stimulate engagement.
No two students are exactly the same, so finding out what makes each learner tick can help you to better tailor your tuition services to individual needs, leading to an increase in student confidence and participation.
Once you know what your student expects of you it can be interesting to find out more about how they perceive their own commitment to tuition classes.
Having built up a relationship with your student you can ask them to do a short self-assessment where they choose three features of their work to analyse, for example: something that they feel needs improvement, an area they feel proud of and an aspect that they are particularly interested in.
Finding out more about how children rate their own participation and commitment can help you identify areas of interest and concern, while helping your student to realise how they might use these to improve the quality of their overall work.
It is important to remember when raising the topic of assessments that the student understands that it will help both of you to find out more about each other and in doing so improve the efficiency of lessons.
Increasing trust and student engagement can greatly enhance the working relationship that you have with your learners and assessment can play a big role in building on the foundations you have already laid, hopefully leading to greater academic success.
|
