What can go wrong in tutoring? Plus solutions.
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.
I wanted to address the problem of what can go wrong in tutoring. This is an interesting question. I have over nine years' experience of tutoring, over 7,000 hours, and 145 students, with a specialism in A-Level Economics tutoring. I've worked for more than ten of the top London tutoring agencies, and at several international tutoring schools. I know the industry very well.
I really love tutoring. Tutoring delivers huge results. The theory and evidence behind that is the zone of proximal development theory from Vygotsky. You concentrate all tuition on the things that are in the way of the student's progress, but which they can overcome and accomplish — challenging but manageable goals. If you help the student accomplish all their challenging but manageable goals, you get a two-standard-deviation improvement in their learning. That gives me great pleasure in this trade, because I can see students progress and improve at accelerated rates, especially in my specialist area. There I've become extremely good at measuring students' zone of proximal development, measuring what students know and what they don't know. But that's not to say that tutoring is always faultless; things can go wrong.
The number one thing that can go wrong
The number one thing that can go wrong is that the tutor can misperceive the student's level — the student's zone of proximal development and their challenging but manageable goals.
An example of this is from the very early days of my tutoring career. I worked at a top international tutoring school, and I was given a student who needed help with their maths to pass biology A-level. A repeated pattern I've noticed, working for more than ten top London tutoring agencies and several Chinese tutoring agencies, is that the tutoring agency — or the tutoring school, in this case — cares a lot less about the outcome than the parents did.
The student was given to me by the tutoring school with the rubric just to improve the student's maths. This was so that she could pass biology A-level, and so that she could redo her maths GCSE. That was the rubric I was given. But it later turned out, when I was talking to the mother on the phone, that she didn't really care that much about the maths GCSE. She cared a lot more about the biology A-level and the maths component of it — just getting that biology result up.
This is something which is always there in any industry: as you add more layers of management on top of the tutor, you end up with a Chinese-whispers problem. The person in charge of the tutoring college gives instructions which are slightly different from what the parent actually asked for. This doesn't ever happen in direct tutoring, and now I work exclusively for parents, because I find it more rewarding to work directly for the parent, directly for the client, than to work through intermediaries.
In this case the student was very shy, and she wasn't very forthcoming about what she needed. And because it was the early days of my tutoring career, I wasn't quite as obsessed with measuring the student's zone of proximal development at this stage. I did what I would consider normal maths GCSE lessons: I prepared resources and asked her to solve the problems. She wrote some solutions down on her tablet, and I wrote some down with her. But because she was quite shy, she didn't like writing very much. I ended up writing probably the majority of the maths down, and she ended up just saying she was very happy with everything.
But when the time came for her biology test, there was an issue. I was following the rubric I was given, to get her to pass GCSE maths, but when the biology test came around, it turned out she couldn't do a whole load of things. I was given the biology mock — we'd done a couple of months' lessons at this point. She couldn't do percentage changes at all, and she was losing loads of marks for that. The mother called me and said she wanted the lessons to focus — contrary to the instructions of the tutoring college — entirely on the biology maths, on this percentage-change material; she didn't want any lessons on GCSE maths.
I completely changed my approach. We switched to in-person delivery. I was getting her to do loads of percentage-change problems between lessons and in lessons with me, until it was easy for her to do all these percentage-change calculations that she needed to do at her biology A-level. She did, in the end, get better. But this case illustrates that sometimes you can waste months, because you don't get the measurement right.
Why the measurement went wrong
There's a variety of reasons. Potentially, working through intermediaries gives you suboptimal information about what the student generally needs and what the parent wants for their child. But that's a small thing.
The second problem is that I should have been reflecting on this case quite a lot, because all my other students were improving quite considerably, and this particular student made no progress for several months. I think that this was a case of: she was nodding and agreeing and happy with everything in the lesson, and she seemed to be participating and explaining things. I believed that she was much better than she actually was.
The fundamental point of tutoring
Tutoring is about measuring the student's problems — measuring the student's challenges, and what the student finds hard. Then it is about setting out a plan of how the student can confront and overcome manageable challenges, in their zone of proximal development, to proceed towards their goal. Obviously, knowing the student's goal is key, but that's straightforward and easy: a student wants an A or an A*, and they want to go to LSE, or Oxford, or Cambridge.
But then, additionally, measurement is absolutely essential. If you don't measure accurately how weak someone is or how strong someone is, then you won't end up teaching them in their zone of proximal development. And since almost all the benefits of tutoring come from enriching someone in their zone of proximal development, the benefits of tutoring could melt away in that scenario.
"He has been proactive identifying the gaps swiftly then tailoring each lesson to our daughter's specific needs (as she is studying for her A Levels)."
Altina, parent
What this taught me
What this taught me was to take measurement extremely seriously, and this is why I built massive quizzes and lots of strategies for measuring the student's knowledge base. I often get the student to scan their entire folder of economics, just so I can see everything they can't do. Usually what people write is a very good measure of what they've engaged with and what they've learned, and it's also very fast to read what someone writes. So as a speedy measurement diagnostic tool, reading the student's actual work folder is extremely good. It's quite easy, even online, to get the scan of the student's folder.
There's loads of scanning software. Then I can take apart, bit by bit, every single challenge for the student, and then systematically plan for the student to confront and overcome all the challenges in their work folder. That works exceptionally well.
I've been doing that now with 145 economics students, where I routinely improve their grades by many grades. I've had many students go from a D to an A, just through fixing systematically every single actual problem in their written work.
"He was extremely clear in explaining concepts and filling in any gaps that our son hadn't grasped in group classes at Sixth Form College... Update on A level results day - our son jumped from a Grade D to a Grade A and has got into his first choice of university."
Emilie, parent, on results day
And then, additionally, I've made a load of quizzes which test the foundational knowledge of A-Level Economics. Because A-Level Economics is built on a set of models, if students don't understand the building blocks of the models, then they can be left behind.
Have a question about your child’s A-Level Economics? Message me — I reply to every one personally.
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