Does Group Tutoring Work?

You want to get tutoring for your children and you are offered group sessions. Group sessions can work even
better than private sessions, if it is conducted correctly.

TRANSCRIPT

Good morning! This is Jason Ursino from Learning Space, and I'm driving to school.

Today I'm going to be talking about effective group tutoring.

If your child is doing some tutoring, and you're contemplating whether to do group or private, group tutoring can be a lot more effective than private, if it's done correctly.

There's two things I want to talk about.

The first one is how the group sessions are delivered.

If the group sessions are delivered, where the program is completely different to what they're doing at school. So the teacher stands in the front of the group just like a class, and they deliver the content, just like they would in a classroom and everyone's doing the same thing in the group session. There's a good chance they're not going to be doing the same thing that the children will be doing at school. So the program at tutoring and the program at school, does not line up. This is not a good thing for tutoring and you probably would prefer to go to private sessions. And I think this is the reason why most parents do not like group tutoring, because they had this idea that that's what it's about. This idea that you have group sessions, they’re like classes, and they're not going to do the stuff they're doing at school. So therefore, they feel like group sessions are not effective.

So, how would group sessions work? Group sessions would work if the students are sitting in a group doing their work and a teacher works from student to student, doing what the student needs to be done, and what they've done at school. So this will work if you have a group tutoring format, where it's like private tutoring in a group setting. The teacher goes from student to student, goes through a concept between a student and makes sure they understand it, it's a concept that they're doing in class at school, give them a question or two to see if they understand it, walk away and then go back and find another student to work with. This will be very effective, because then the student works through that question without the teacher looking over their shoulder and then makes the mistakes as they would in an exam. And the teacher corrects it, this is a lot more effective in the private tutoring format, where the teacher looks over the shoulder and the student constantly looks up and says, “is this right?”, “Is this right?” So very important that the group sessions are delivered appropriately and line up with what's happening at school. So when an exam comes up at school, the student is ready. Very important.

The second thing I want to talk about with group tutoring is the idea of the winning environment.

And we all know about this, because in every other part of our lives, whether there is a challenge, we think of this winning environment and having the team around us. So for example, if you run a huge business, you're going to want a winning team around you, you're going to want the right marketers, the right people in finance, all that sort of thing, so you want the right team around you if you're running a huge business. Secondly, if you are a sports person, you're going to want the right team around you. There could be a winning team with great teammates that have the same goal. Or, it could also be having the right people around you to look after your body so it could be the physio, it could be the coach, all that sort of thing. If you wanted to climb Mount Everest, you could not do that alone, you will need a team around you to make sure that you can do it. And for some reason, we all understand that but when it comes to studying that does not connect, and we want our students to do well and as parents we want our children to study so we send them to a room isolated on their own. We send them to tutoring isolated with a private tutor. However, statistics have shown and research has shown that students perform much better in a group session if the group is effective, if the group works very, very well. So the winning environment is something that's very, very important and it's something that works very well.

So group sessions can work even better in the private sessions, if it's done properly.

If you like my videos, there are more of them at www.learningspace.net.au/drivingtoschool and have a good day.