How to Be Creative as a Student Tutor

By Kaitlin Hurtado on May 16, 2017

Tutoring is a different experience for everyone. Some students may seek out tutoring on their own, wanting to get more academic help, while others are coerced into getting tutored because of low academic performance.

As a tutor, you want to make the situation helpful and comfortable for each of your students and you may have to be creative as you realize that each one is different with their own set of needs.

Image via pixabay.com

Change up the place for your tutoring sessions

After a tutoring session or two with a student, you may find each tutoring session not turning out the way you had planned for. You can try your hardest to go over the lesson plan you had prepared, only to have your student distracted for the duration of your tutoring session, turning at every loud sound produced in the local coffee shop where you had planned to meet.

If you already know your student is easily distracted, change up the location of your tutoring session to best fit the needs of your student. Reserve a study room at your city or campus library, ensuring that you will have a quiet, yet somewhat open space to be productive while facing limited distractions.

On the other hand, if you find your student falling asleep or too tired to keep their full attention on what you are helping them with, take the tutoring session elsewhere. A coffee shop that is somewhat small and not too busy will have caffeine steps away and enough background noise to keep your student alert. If a coffee shop is still too loud, try a local park so that the sounds of nature can serve as the background noise to your tutoring sessions.

A change in scenery from a typical study space might be just what your student needs to get into the zone for a tutoring session.

Understand each of your students’ learning styles and adapt to them 

Everyone has different learning styles. A student that is a visual learner can be struggling in a specific course if their professor only vocally teaches during lectures without any visuals. If you don’t realize that they are a visual learner and teach in the same style as their professor, you won’t be helping your student much. Incorporate different types of visuals into your lesson plans, helping them better understand course content.

Rather than just saying how two concepts are similar and different, provide a visual Venn diagram to help your student understand the concepts. By providing different things like visuals during your tutoring sessions, you can supplement everything you say with a visual and refer back to it even when you find yourself a little lost on the tutoring session’s content.

Adapt to your student’s personal interests

Try and put effort into getting to know your student. Being genuine can go a long way with someone, whether you incorporate it into the actual lesson plan or into ordinary conversation with your student.

If you know they like a certain sport and television show, try to incorporate it into your lesson plan any way you can. Tutoring your student for a foreign language? Guide your student into a conversation discussing the latest episode of their favorite television show in Spanish instead of English. Getting your student as excited to engage in your lesson plan should be your end goal — it won’t necessarily happen every single time, but by putting more effort into keeping your student genuinely interested, you will be one step closer to getting your student genuinely interested in your tutoring sessions.

Showing a genuine interest in their personal interests can help in the long run. If you notice a typically alert student distracted and quiet during a tutoring session, take a break from your lesson plan and try to figure out where you student’s mind is. Talking through a personal problem might be what they need to get back to studying, or you may even need to just cut the tutoring session short instead of forcing your student into trying to learn on an off day.

When you show genuine interest in your students, they will most likely feel more comfortable being with you in a tutoring session rather than simply seeing you as someone trying to teach them material they do not want to learn. Don’t start every tutoring session by directly diving into the lesson plan. Take time to ask how they’ve been, or how their other classes are going for them.

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