Why does tutoring work? Put another way, what things make tutoring effective? You need to know this because tutoring while missing some of these ingredients can drastically reduce your progress. 1 Targeted Instruction In the classroom, teachers try to teach year-level content to a large group of students. And these students often have very different learning needs. With personalised tutoring, we start with what you understand and can do. We ...
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Why do some children fail at school? To some, failure is a dirty word, but I believe if we are not bluntly honest about things – we can’t fix them. That said, failure can mean different things to different students. For some, failure may be getting a D in Mathematics. For another student, it may be getting a B. It depends on your current situation and your goal. And, of ...
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There are many ways to describe learning, but one of the simplest is that learning = understanding + remembering. Understanding what you are taught is crucial to learning, whether in school or with a tutor. Sadly, many students believe they understand more than they really do. In this article, you will discover 5 ways to boost your understanding of any topic you are learning about. Throughout the article, I will ...
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If you are a student of mine (or a potential one), you want to improve your results. Tutoring works, but there are 3 keys to improving your results: You and I both have a role to play in each of these. Understanding My first goal is to help you understand something, whether it be how to use Herson’s rule in trigonometry or the role of the scientific method in psychology. ...
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Despite some popular opinion to the contrary, memory is critical to learning in school, including tutoring. But its importance is downplayed often in favour of things such as deep understanding and critical thinking. Of course, you should want to develop a deep understanding of the material you are learning. But, deep understanding relies on memory. And as my next article points out, thinking is also central to learning. But thinking ...
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If you want to ace your exams, you must know about and avoid what psychologists call the illusion of learning. Sadly, it is something that even students who spend countless hours studying can fall victim to. Put simply, you fall victim to the illusion of learning when you think you know more than you really do. Yet, if you are like most students, you are not a fool. So why ...
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Many of my tutoring students ask me, “How do I get motivated to do my homework?” It helps to keep your long-term goals in mind. The better you do at school, the easier it is to pursue a range of options for the rest of your life. Short-term goals can help a little bit as well. But, when push comes to shove, goals are not always enough. We all have ...
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If your teacher has asked you to prepare a persuasive speech or essay, you must use different types of persuasive devices or risk failing. As a tutor, explaining the types of persuasive devices is one of the first things I do when helping my students. But what are persuasive devices? They are strategies that help make your point more convincing. While many specific strategies exist, they can be placed into ...
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Thinking hard is the key to effective learning (and studying), whether at school, at home or when being tutored. But why? And what does thinking hard actually involve? Why Think Hard? Because of the role memory plays in learning. When you think about something, you leave a memory trace. A memory trace is like a pathway that you can follow to find a particular memory later. But not all pathways ...
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