Eight Instructional Strategies to Use in Tutoring

Being a tutor involves a lot of dynamic thinking. You should learn to get the students’ attentions and provide them with information that is not difficult to grasp. Basically, you should provide them with easy methods that are both interesting and informative. This can be quite tough if you teach subjects that normally require much concentration; however, here are eight interesting instructional strategies you could use when you tutor.

Realization Sessions

Most students will be wondering about the importance of a certain subject. They may feel that Algebra may be a pain and won’t bother paying attention because of this assumption, for instance. Focus on redirecting their thoughts and cite examples where the subjects can be put to use in everyday activities. This will help students relate to the subject matter a whole lot better.

Emotional Connections

If a subject makes people sad, show it instead of tell them. For instance, history topics tend to arouse emotions a lot, so try and connect with your students so they can feel the pain of the victims of World War II or perhaps the success of the Great Roman Empire. Take note of language use and emotional responses; people tend to retain information that has a certain emotional tinge to it because they can recall the ideas when they think of the emotion, so work with that.

Interactive Discussion

Engage your students by allowing them to share their ideas. Start with open-ender questions that will motivate your students to think. No matter how farfetched their ideas are, try to channel them so that your students are not intimidated. Interactive discussions are very good ways of improving self-confidence.

Practice and Repetition

Sometimes, an exercise in repetition is vital for allowing students to learn the subject material even better. Show them fun mnemonics to learn for the natural sciences or some techniques in solving math problems so that students can understand these concepts and equations with ease. Give them fun examples to try out so that they can enjoy solving.

Game Association

Relate the subject material through a game; this involves a lot of learning and team work. People enjoy playing games because of the fun element. If you channel in your tutoring scheme with this, you can easily tap into the learning centers of the students.

Reinforced Learning

Instead of focusing on one subject matter, show students the connection with other important topics. For instance, instead of focusing on just History, show how this subject affects Economics and even Geography, two other subject matters. This will widen the students’ scope of learning.

Skills Assessment

Assess your students’ skills by giving out tests. Then, help them improve. This cycle allows you to gage the level of learning your students achieved. Afterwards, you may adjust your teaching strategies to meet the level of learning at hand.

Positive Conditioning

Whenever a student answers a question correctly or scores a high score in a test, reward him or her. This motivates the student to perform well during the tutorial sessions. Positive conditioning also increases learning potential because of the desire to achieve success based on the initial reward. Students will be more prompted to be more active in the learning process.

Tutoring is fun, particularly if your students enjoy the sessions. Be creative in administering the instructional strategies to ensure effective learning and development during your tutoring sessions.