4 Qualities Student Tutors Need For Maximum Effectiveness

If you’ve ever been tutored, you can likely identify what you liked and didn’t like about the way your tutor explained things to you. You may have liked that your tutor took the time to learn about your personal learning preferences, or that your tutor was able to arrive organized for each tutoring session you had.

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To be an effective student tutor, you will ideally draw upon certain qualities and skills you have that translate into solid teaching. In order to maximize clarity and helpfulness, tutors should have the following qualities that will work to best serve their tutees.

1. Patience.

Patience is one of the foremost qualities necessary to be a successful student tutor, for quite obvious reasons. It may take a long, long time for a student to understand a concept that you may personally think is easy or fundamental.

It is critical that tutors do not make fun of their students for what they do or do not know, and that tutors remain encouraging and supportive of any amount of progress students make in their learning. What seems like a small improvement to you may be a huge stride for a student, and it is important to make your tutoring spaces a judgment-free zone, or safe space.

When students ask the same question for the 10th time in a week, do not write a student off as stupid; perhaps the fault may actually be yours, and maybe you can find a new way to clarify difficult subject matter either through supplementary materials, or even analogies that link a seemingly out-of-reach concept to something that a student knows well. If you are routinely impatient when tutoring, tutees will feel less and less welcome in your sessions and may even find another tutor.

2. Creativity.

Tutees don’t want a boring lecture in their tutoring sessions, so creativity is another essential skill student tutors need in order to make memorable, inventive lessons that their students will benefit from. Having a creative activity for your tutees to complete shows that you care about them and their progress, since creative activities reinforce complicated material more strongly. Your activities don’t need to be complicated or long — just unique.

Along these lines, tutors need to be able to explain concepts in more than one way. It’s pretty well-understood that not everyone learns the same way. Thus, no single way of explaining a concept is going to make sense to every student. The ability to produce a variety of different explanations and approaches to problem-solving is crucial for helping the most diverse group of tutees you may have, and dynamic explanations are vital to tutoring. Experiment with different methods of explaining material — this way, students will feel empowered enough to try out problems on their own because they will have seen a topic presented to them in a different way.

To give your students even more academic support, refer them to YouTube channels that they can watch for extra help in their subject in between tutoring sessions. Some great explanatory video channels for biology or chemistry can be found on Crash Course Biology/Chemistry, for example, and these silly videos are both informative and entertaining to watch. Giving your tutees resources beyond what you can provide in an in-person tutoring session can make a huge difference in helping tutees heighten their study skills independently: a win-win.

3. Mastery (or near-mastery) of your tutoring subject.

This is probably the most important quality you look for in a tutor — command of the material in which you are actually being tutored. If you’re trying to tutor chemistry but can’t tell an atom from a molecule, you might want to check your skills and see if there’s a subject in which you’re exceptionally strong (tutor students in subjects you know well, so you can answer a variety of questions!)

If you are committed to tutoring a certain subject, do some self-studying before each tutoring session just to make sure you’re well-versed in the material. Do not feel like you need to know everything — tutors are not perfect and are allowed to make mistakes.

4. Flexibility.

Your tutees likely have schedules which change continuously, and thus your students may request to move a tutoring session to different days and times on sometimes short notice. Peer tutors should ideally work with their students to create a tutoring schedule that works for both tutors and tutees. Flexibility in your schedule is key to making the most out of your tutoring experience, because the more students you can accommodate, the more experience you’ll receive (and the more money you’ll hopefully make!)

There are several factors that contribute to a tutor’s clarity and helpfulness. Above all, doing your best to understand your students’ needs is the root of being a helpful peer tutor. In order to be the tutor that other students want, you should think about being the tutor that you’d like to have. Be honest, knowledgeable, and do not be afraid to try new methods of tutoring.