Essay writing is one of the hardest subjects to feel like you're improving in. With maths, you either get the answer right or you don't. With essays, progress is quieter, and a lot of students start to feel like nothing is changing when in fact the small incremental improvements are slowly but consistantly building up. In fact, I experienced this with a couple students throughout my time working here. These students all had differnet problems but all felt the same, no progress was being made. My solution was to break down essay writing into different, unique yet nessacery changes, sentence structure, improving flow, techniques, analysis, etc. Now by themselves these improvments felt almost non existant, but over time, these small improvements, when stacked together started showing improvements, noticed not just by me but by every single on of my students that I used this teaching technique with. This is what I think gets missed when people judge progress purely by marks. A mark is one number that tries to summarise ability over many differnet skills and requirements, and even if some of those skills are improving, the mark might not budge for a while. However, the student is still improving, slowly yet consistantly and eventually, the marks start to reflect it. Tutoring doesn't just instantly turn a student into A+ top of the class, there has to be cooperation, engagement and disipline from the student and breaking up content into small, acheivable goals, makes that way more possible. Doing this gives a student something they can actually comprehend, an improvement that they actually know that they made, instead of just "getting better at essays". That's really a core concept for doing effective, helpful tutoring, not just jumping from topic to topic or handing a student a big objective with no clear path to getting there. Taking the sessions day by day and focusing on the small wins, That's how its done!
