Educating and Educated (Sept-Oct 2019)

Online tutoring for international students preparing for entrance exams to Uk boarding schools.

Background:

I temporarily managed the online Keystone Tutoring of five children based in Singapore and Hong Kong. The children ranged between the ages of 8 and 15 and were all applying for prestigious boarding schools in England. All sessions were conducted over voice-call and in a mututal online classroom.

Research Methods:

Once I had my initial session with each child I was able to start building lesson plans around their abilities and what they were revising for.

Passive Observation:

Most of the children had upcoming exams, when I first met them I asked them what their favourite and least favourite subjects were. I then set them papers under exam conditions. The mututal online classroom allowed me to observe how long they spent on each section, whether and when they got distracted and allowed me to hear what they were doing so I knew if they were doing the task at hand.

I wouldn't speak to them until the end of the exam-condition period unless they had questions or had been distracted for a long amount of time. This allowed me to fully understand their personal processes. Through doing this, combined with asking them three things that went well and three that did not, I was able to quickly identify where they succeeded and where they were struggling.

Secondary Research:

If the child was struggling with an obvious aspect of their academia I would google it and look at parent and teacher forums, which often had the answers.

Primary Research:

I would answer all of the questions that I was going to set for each child before the session with them. Once I had done it one way I would go back to the beginning and try and do it another way. Once I had run out of ideas of different ways to solve each question I would google if there were other possible ways to solve them. This was so I had first-hand experience of the processes they might be using. Every child may approach a problem in a slightly different way and so it helped me to practice every way to help understand their process, why they might be struggling and how to explain it to them in a way that they could relate to.

Example: One child was practicing for their 11+ English exam at Harrow.

Problem:They were easily distracted, they would often try and talk about unrelated topics to waste time. However, they loved English but could never finish in time. I always asked the tutees to spend 5 minutes writing a plan as part of the 25 minutes allocated for their English question. This individual would write 'intro', 'para 1', 'para 2' and 'conc', and would write as much as they could under each heading, going over the 5 minutes, and then would continue to write the essay separately. They would get frustrated and distracted when writing their plan because they weren't planning it, they were essentially writing two essays.

Solution: Because the child was easily distracted and didn't know how to condense their plan I thought making a visual plan could be a good solution. I asked them to draw mind maps (to keep their focus with a visual), starting with one word in each bubble (to get them to condense their plan) until they had a good structure, then if they had enough time to write a topic sentence for each section with no more than 10 words in each. I also explained how they could keep track of the time by allocating each paragraph a certain amount of time and how to wrap up and move on if they were struggling for time.

Result: In the future sessions I had with this child they had greatly improved their timing and structure of their essay questions and were less prone to distraction before they started.

Skills:

I learned a lot from this role and really enjoyed the work. My time management was really tested during this time as I was working two full days a week and had also returned to university, whilst managing 5 hours of tutoring for different families in different time zones. However, through careful scheduling, I was able to do all three with ease.

The main challenge I found was identifying each tutee's problem areas within the time I was tutoring them and finding ways to combat this in time for their entrance exams. However, with a mixture of passive observation and asking them for their feedback on their work we were able to identify their problem areas together.