Pedagogical Challenges of Being a Tutor - From Learning Mathematics with Technology (CEP 805)

My best friend and I used to do close reading of Harry Potter together and we would say, “Helga Hufflepuff had the best pedagogy.” I want to be like Helga Hufflepuff: accepting all children to teach, meeting them where they are, encouraging them from their starting place. This week’s dive into various pedagogies had me questioning myself and the effectiveness of my pedagogical practices.

One of the pedagogies I shared is flipped mastery. This is a system that I learned about in my master’s program in Education. The idea is that students watch instruction or lecture videos at home and then do the homework in the classroom where they have teachers or fellow classmates to help them if they get stuck.

Sal Khan's TED Talk on flipped classrooms inspires me greatly. I love this idea for high school math classes. As much as I love a flipped classroom concept, as a one-on-one math tutor, I can’t use it.

My unique context as a tutor means I cannot use most of the pedagogical tools that I have learned throughout my master’s degree program. Many assignments in my courses have asked that we have students work in groups. My instructors ask for feedback from a class, when I do not teach a class. I did an assignment called “My Favorite No” and much of the benefit is from class interaction and discussion. I can do the part where students solve math problems, but the part where the students talk together about the problem is not possible as a tutor. Having limited options has made me question if I can have good pedagogy. The primary affordance to one-on-one teaching is being able to tailor everything to the individual student. The constraint is that I am unable to do anything that uses group learning or student interaction.

I noticed that the pedagogies I chose for my Numbers and Operations creation were both tools that I consider traditional and boring. I was feeling judgemental of myself and what I chose because it felt like I was not engaging with the information from the week. What I chose for my creation were direct instruction and modeling. Those methods have value; that is what drove me to choose them. A con of both is that they are less interesting than other options. They both can fail to keep a student engaged. Many of the pedagogies that were available for exploration this week encouraged student interaction, student-led learning, and small groups. While I consider one of my main pedagogical goals as a tutor to be almost entirely student-led, which is not something classroom teachers can do. My context as a tutor is different from a classroom context, and pedagogical considerations in a one-on-one learning environment have their own strengths and challenges.

References

Midwinter, A. (2015, March 14). My Favorite No [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/srJWx7P6uLE

TED. (2011, March 9). Let's use video to reinvent education | Salman Khan [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/nTFEUsudhfs

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