This week's reflections
Term is underway and the search for a tutor starts. Names gets passed round on WhatsApp groups, a profile looks impressive – loads of A* grades, a price gets agreed and that is it. Very rarely does anyone ask the one question that matters. Can this person teach?
Knowing a subject and teaching a subject are two different jobs. You can get an A* in Biology and have no idea how to explain osmosis to someone who has never understood it.
On my mind this week
I’ve been a research scientist, a food microbiologist, a lifeguard, a kennelhand, a waitress, a barmaid and a call centre worker. I spent one very fun summer making bus passes for the council. Every one of those jobs made me better at the thing I do now.
I started teacher training in a deprived area where students smoked in the playground at break-time. I taught in the school I went to myself. I finished my classroom career at a top grammar school. Along the way came ski trips, table tennis tournaments, two horse riding teams I set up from scratch, Head of Year, Head of House. You are very rarely just teaching the subject you signed up for.
I was not even good at teaching for about the first four years. I had no idea how we learn. I based everything on what school had been like for me. I got things wrong, changed them, got them wrong again and kept tweaking things. That is how you learn to teach.
Anyone can call themselves a tutor. There is no qualification required. You can finish your A levels in August and you can charge more than a teacher earns in an hour by September.
Fair play to the ones doing it, by the way. A nineteen year old spending Tuesday evening explaining photosynthesis to a Year 12 is using their time far better than the ones drinking their student loan. I would much rather see that.
However, nobody watches the session. Nobody asks the student afterwards whether any of it went in. Nobody tells the tutor they lost the room ten minutes from the end. They get paid either way…
We have mentors at The A Level Club who are exactly those people, medics and recent A* students. They are brilliant at what we ask them to do. They talk students through the thinking behind exam questions and refresh topics. They do not deliver the courses. Qualified teachers do that. Their subject knowledge is incredible, but that is not the same as knowing how to get the best out of a student. Olympic coaches aren’t necessarily former Olympic athletes.
What makes it work is everything around them. Our mentors are trained across every exam board we teach and they work to a plan I have written. Their sessions run on our Zoom account and what happens in them comes back to me. I pass feedback to parents because I am your point of contact, not them. If something is not working with a student, we change how we do it.
That is the bit you are paying for and it is the bit an hourly rate on a website does not give you.
Study Tip
If you are seeing anyone this term, a tutor, a mentor, or your own teacher at lunchtime, do not turn up empty handed.
Before the session, write down three things. One question you got wrong and cannot see why. One topic you could not explain out loud if someone asked you to. One thing from last year you have avoided ever since.
Take those three things in with you. An hour spent on your actual gaps is better than an hour of someone talking through a topic you already knew.
Then, after the session, teach it back to somebody. If you cannot, you have not got it yet and you need to do it again.
For parents
Before you book anyone, ask what experience they have, not what they got in their A levels.
Good questions to ask: How long have you been teaching this specification? Who checks how your sessions go? What happens if my child is not making progress?
Watch what happens when you ask. Someone who teaches for a living will have an answer ready. Grades are the easy bit for them to give you evidence for, but they tell you nothing about how that person communicates or whether they can make something complicated easy to take in.
Quote of the week
“Knowing the answer and being able to explain it are two different skills.”
