Tutoring is so much more than typical ROTE learning and revisiting the same classroom textbook definitions and material, rather, it is about engaging students the right way so that it makes the content stick. This can be achieved through a vast array of techniques and games that really sparks new ways of thinking and visualising the concepts, but largely is part of the type of teaching called active learning. New teaching methods arise all the time, yet standard teachers in a room of 30 students become very limited in the way they can teach and often revisit standard memorisation and the intense repetition of it right before exams time after time. The flaw with this method, albeit good short-term for marks means that students often fail to gain proper understanding and be able to apply their learning to the world around them. Active learning strategies such as being asked to teach the content the way they’ve learnt it to someone else for example being the tutor, or asking open ended questions to slowly guide the students answer and explain how they got there, allow students to retain knowledge by engaging the content in a more fun and less standardised way. I find these techniques particularly help with teaching mathematics as teaching derivatives for example seem empty handed, but when you phrase a question differently such as making the variables context relevant to the students passions. For example if a student is super into space and rocketry, you could shape the variables into how rocket fuel is consumed over time as well as how the decrease in mass would affect airtime. Now each concept can be related to a larger and more interesting purpose where suddenly the student can find the respective maximums and minimums to ultimately solve real world challenges and problems of creating the most efficient solution. Ultimately, how knowledge gets taught from one person to another has huge implications on the amount of knowledge actually being retained, where in more smaller settings, these techniques can be better put in practice.
starsky
