Your kids go to a tutoring center. Are they getting the best out of it? Most tutoring centers get this wrong
TRANSCRIPT
Good morning. This is Jason Ursino from Learning Space, and I'm driving to school. Today, I'm going to be talking about what some tutoring centres do wrong. This is important because if you're going to send your son or daughter to a tutoring centre, you're going to want to ask about this one. What some tutoring centres do is they have their own standard program. What that means is it doesn't matter what your son or daughter is doing at school, what topic they're doing. Say, for example, in mathematics, they're doing some algebraic topic, for example, at school, and a test is coming up at school with it, the tutoring centre will have a completely different program and they might be doing a topic that's completely different to what they are doing at school. Although some people do benefit from this because it could be the off chance where a student is doing okay in the topic at school and he's an opportunity to learn another topic simultaneously, it doesn't really set them up for the upcoming exams. They might set them up for a yearly exam at the end, but the ongoing exams that schools have, and schools are starting to do a little bit more with their assessments like weekly assignments, etc, It is important that you get the support in the topics that they're currently doing at school; we're not doing a completely different topic.
The reason why some tutoring centres do this is because it's economical. All they need to do is have some computer program or some standard book that every student does. They all sit down and they're all following the same book like an assembly line and they're doing these topics one after another. Now, these topics, as I said, most of the time do not line up with what's happening at school. Therefore, when they go to school and they sit their exams, they're not going to be ready for it. What you want to do is when you look for tutoring, you want to make sure that the centre or the tutor themselves lines up with what's happening at school. If your son or daughter is doing algebra at school, then they need to be doing algebra at tutoring, not something completely different. That's very important to understand because you want your son or daughter to be ready for the next assessment. You want your son and daughter to have the support that they're having for the topics that they're currently doing at school. That's important to ask about. A lot of tutoring centres don't really talk about this unless you directly ask them.
Make sure that you do ask them that, okay, you are offering this tutoring service. It's in the group sessions, which is fine. However, what happens if each of the students in the group are doing different topics at school? Are they all just going to be following your program, which can be completely different at school? Or is it going to be a situation where it's tailored to the individual needs of the students and make sure that the topics are lined up with what's happening at school and the assessments that are coming up? If you like my videos, there are more of them at learningspace.net.au/drivingtheschool and have a good day.