How can I tell if a tutor is actually any good?
I (George Chantry) voice dictated every one of these articles to give my honest, transparent view on economics A-Level tutoring to answer parent questions, having worked in the tutoring industry for nine years. Please WhatsApp me if you want to discuss anything in the articles further or have any further questions.
Measurement is everything
Measurement is foundational. Measurement is everything in tutoring. I think, if you want to identify if someone is a high-quality tutor, you ask them how they measure someone. You ask them how they figure out if somebody knows the foundational elements of the subject, the building blocks of the subject. Or you ask them how they figure out if someone's a really strong student, or a really weak student. What about students who are super shy, who don't even want to tell you anything, and just nod along? How do you figure out how good they are?
I've worked for nine years in the tutoring industry, but I really think that the key measure of quality is how good someone is at measurement. The point is that getting data is very important.
Tutoring is like medicine: diagnose before you treat
It's the same in medicine: you have to get the test results, get them to the specialist. Then the test results indicate what the diagnosis is, and that indicates what the right approach is to solving the patient's problem. I think in tutoring, especially if you have a sufficiently adept subject specialist who's worked for long enough as a tutor, the bread and butter distinction between a professional and an amateur is: how do you diagnose what people don't know? And how do you do it cheaply and quickly? Because you can't take two months over it, you've got to do it very, very quickly.
The diagnostic tools I've built
What I've done is: I've built a game, I've built a database of hundreds of possible questions in economics, where I test if students know the topic area that each question is going to be on. It's a very efficient, very fast way of figuring out if someone knows what they're doing. You could just ask people, what would be your favourite exam question? And see if they can explain at least the rough structure of the exam, the rough structure of the topics. These are great diagnostic questions — and it actually takes a long time to build the best questions to ask to identify most rapidly what students don't know. It's not a trivial problem, it's quite a difficult problem. So this is where you're getting value for money by paying for a better tutor: you're getting faster results, and you're getting less wasted time, where the tutor hasn't measured properly what's wrong and what needs to be fixed.
Also, in A-Level Economics, getting students to define basic equations doesn't take very long, it takes a few seconds. For example, getting someone to define aggregate demand, or define why long-run aggregate supply shifts. These are very basic concepts. A good student has to rattle it off in two, three seconds. But if the student doesn't know it, it gives you very useful information. So there are certain questions you can ask, which are at the foundation of the subject, which give you immediate insights into the student's knowledge base. If the student gives us a perfect answer, then their foundational knowledge is strong, it doesn't need to be corrected. But if a student gives a weak answer on a foundational equation in A-Level theory, that is a red flag. That would then indicate that there's something wrong that I need to investigate further and fix.
Similarly, I've generated quizzes where I can test every single diagram and test if the student knows and can identify it. This is also extremely useful as a test, because the models and the diagrams are the foundational cement of the whole of A-Level Economics.
There are other very straightforward diagnostic questions, which give a lot of information. This is just asking the student the structure of each question type. Again, if they come back to you with a perfect answer, saying this is exactly what the mark scheme wants, this is how many marks are awarded for knowledge, application, evaluation, this is my structure — then you move on. You don't need to waste time on something that they know. But sometimes you get students who have absolutely no clue what the mark scheme wants, absolutely no clue what the rewards are on the mark scheme, so that would then be an indicator of something worth fixing.
Measure from as many directions as possible
I have many, many more strategies for figuring out what students don't know. What you want to do is measure the problem of what students don't know from as many directions as possible. You want to measure it from the perspective of: is there any evidence in their written folder that they've ever used a particular diagram? Let's say, when I ask them for the definition of that curve, can they provide the definition? So that would be two ways of measuring it: one, did they write it down in their folder, did they use it in their exam, did they use it in their preparation? Two, can they recall a basic foundational fact about it? And then a third way of measuring it is usually self-reports. Use those. You ask the student, what do you struggle with? What areas of this do you find the hardest? Self-reports aren't always the most accurate, though, because students often don't know what they don't know. But the expert tutor should be able to diagnose what the student doesn't know very quickly, with the strategies I've been giving you, and then solve the specific problems. All of this can be accelerated, so you can get better, faster outcomes.
Only fix what you measure
My experience tutoring for over nine years is that I've now put this methodology of measurement into every lesson. I only fix what I measure as students actually not knowing. Then I record everything students don't know in linear lesson notes, and I come back to it until I'm satisfied that it's completely resolved. This keeps the student in their zone of proximal development for a very long time. It helps lessons be tailored to what the student actually needs. Everyone knows that throwing money at problems isn't the best way to solve them. You want to invest in your child where the return is highest as measured by a professional economics tutor. I understand that some parents sometimes feel that way, because they really want their kid to improve, and that's fine. But your best value for money is going to come from a tutor who has measured exactly what's wrong, and then fixed exactly what's wrong. Then the tutor has evidence of what was originally wrong, what they fixed, and then the evidence that the deficiency in the student's knowledge has actually gone away.
If a tutor follows this methodology that I'm laying out, they will resolve the number one problem in tutoring. It's not that hard to solve if you're a subject specialist in the area that you're trying to work on, but it is the most important thing in tutoring.
The same problem looks different in different students
Measure what's wrong, and that can be completely different for different students. When I have A-Level Economics students, some of them don't know what aggregate demand is, that is like not knowing what demand is. So that's a very foundational knowledge deficiency, and you can identify that by asking them to define it, asking them to draw it, reading their folder, checking did they ever draw it. And then if that's a failure in a foundational building block of the subject, then you have to go back and fix that.
But then there are other students in economics who are actually fine with aggregate demand, they have no issues with those things. They have more problems with knowing what's relevant to questions, so they have the knowledge base, but they don't know how to use it in context to answer an exam question. That's a different problem. And then I have other ways of measuring that, with the massive past-paper database that's categorised by topic that I've built. So a very high-quality tutor will be able to have quick-fire questions, which are data-rich in terms of understanding student knowledge gaps, and then precisely fix those individual knowledge gaps. And through this methodology that I'm laying out here, I think that in my lessons I've completely resolved the number one problem that can happen in tutoring. That is misperceiving what students don't know, especially in the context of A-Level Economics.
"He has been proactive identifying the gaps swiftly then tailoring each lesson to our daughter's specific needs."
Altina, parent
"Gaps in knowledge are spotted and dealt with quickly. As parents, we receive regular detailed updates on progress."
Sheetal, parent
The question every parent should ask
My lessons are extremely good at measuring and fixing what people don't know. But if you're a parent paying for tutoring, always double-check: what has the tutor found out that your child doesn't know? You can ask them this way. What have you found out that my child doesn't know, and what have you fixed? And a good tutor should be able to answer that question. They should be able to say, okay, I found out this child didn't know x, and then I fixed x.
This is the whole point of tutoring: getting people to succeed in their zone of proximal development. So if the tutor misses what zone the student is in, then the lesson will not be effective.
When it isn't obvious: read the folder
And sometimes what is wrong with individual students isn't obvious, you don't know what to test for initially. That's where reading the student's folder is extremely useful. When I read the student's folder, if they have a foundational knowledge gap, often it's transparent in their written work. That's something I have to go back and correct — it may have caused them to be lost for the last year and a half. When I get the scan of their school folder, I can see clearly that they never engaged with a particular diagram, a particular curve. That would give me a big clue to test for that straight away.
A second-order problem that people may not have thought of: measuring the student's zone of proximal development is critical, but when you get a new student in and you haven't got that much data on them, what do you test for? What do you test for, and try to measure whether someone knows or doesn't know something? There are obvious things: do they know the mark scheme, do they know how to structure their answer for each question type (5,8,12,15 markers), do they know the topic from the specification behind each question and can they identify the topic area for a question? These are all things to test for, for everyone. But then the syllabus is quite long. You're dealing with a two-year syllabus, you could test hundreds of things.
It's best to test foundational knowledge on which other things depend. But the advantage of having the student's folder scanned upfront is I can go in and I can identify all the likely culprits of things that the student doesn't know. Then immediately in the first tutoring lesson I test them on all the things that have potentially gone wrong. I make a detailed record of everything I say. I don't record what students say, but I record everything I say. I want to measure the student's zone of proximal development by keeping detailed records of everything the student got wrong in lesson. It is useful to keep a record of everything students got wrong because that gives you a useful record of things to test in the future. Then you're constantly measuring what the student's zone is. Then you're constantly moving them forward into that zone with new challenges that are optimally suited to their progress.
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