5 Ways to Personalize Lessons for Your Tutoring Student

By Elana Goodwin on December 21, 2016

Tutoring other students in college can give you great experience to put on your resume and teach you a lot.

One of the things that you’ll soon learn from tutoring is that no two students are the same and as such, your tutoring approach may need to vary in order to best serve the student. A blanket approach to tutoring won’t work; you need to be able to adapt and tailor each tutoring session to the student you’re tutoring — so here are some tips on how to personalize lessons for your tutoring students.

Photo Credit: Pexels.com

1. Figure out what kind of learner they are. The best way to personalize your tutoring sessions to the student is to figure out what kind of learner they are. Do they do best by listening or doing? Talk to each student and ask them what method of teaching they’ll most benefit from. For visual learners who learn better when they’re able to see or observe things, try to use more pictures, charts, diagrams, and handouts, and use different colored highlighters and color coding to help your tutoring student keep up with you.

For auditory learners who learn best when listening, read material and assignments out loud and really talk through and explain everything so they understand. For kinesthetic learners who learn best by doing, let them take more of the lead in your tutoring sessions and be there more as support and a person they can turn to when they need you. Once you and your tutoring student have figured out what kind of learner they are, both of you can talk over how to best serve the student’s needs and then tailor your tutoring session to their learning methods.

2. Familiarize yourself with the assignments/subject. Your tutoring students will also have differing classes, assignments, and professors — and in order for your tutoring session to be the most beneficial and personalized, you’ll want to be familiar with the subject matter and assignments.

To do this, consider asking the students you tutor to send you their syllabi or the guidelines of their assignment prior to your meeting with them for tutoring. This way, you’ll have time before you and your tutoring student get together to read over the assignment or course material and be more prepared to actually get down to tutoring them when you meet, rather than wasting time at the beginning of the session to familiarize yourself with the assignment or specific subject.

3. Be creative. Sometimes, even if you’ve personalized your tutoring to the student and familiarized yourself with their materials, your tutoring just won’t gel with the student. Perhaps one of you is having an off-day or the student just isn’t getting it. As a tutor, you need to be able to roll with the punches and adapt on the fly, which means having the ability to be creative. Perhaps using a TV show scenario as an example will help your student understand their material or maybe a change of scenery from the library to the quad will make for a better learning environment on a particular day.

Personalizing your tutoring lessons means going beyond just making sure your tutoring style matches their learning style and being familiar with their material — it also means reading your tutoring student during each session and being able to understand when or if they need to do something different for that lesson.

4. Open a discussion. Before each tutoring session, talk with your student — don’t just get down to business. Ask them about their classes, how their day has been, etc. Doing this will make your tutoring student feel more comfortable with you and enable them to be more open about whether they’re understanding the material as you’re tutoring them, if they need you to go over something again, etc.

You want the students you’re tutoring to see you sort of as a friend and as someone who cares about them and wants to help them. If they do, your tutoring sessions will be that much more pleasant and successful as you’ll build rapport and be able to personalize your sessions even better to that student and you and your tutoring student will be on your way to a solid tutoring relationship that really benefits the student.

5. Ask for feedback. Another great way to learn how to better personalize your tutoring lessons to each student is to ask for feedback at the end of each session. Of course, if the student doesn’t feel comfortable with you, they may not give you honest feedback that you can actually use to help make yourself a more successful tutor, which is why it’s important to build good relationships with your tutoring students.

Once you’ve got that, they’ll be more willing to give you workable feedback as they’ll want to let you know how you can personalize your tutoring sessions more and what works for them and what doesn’t.

There’s no one right way to tutor, especially when it comes to college students. But using these tips, you should be able to personalize your tutoring lessons to each student and be a better tutor.

Follow Uloop

Apply to Write for Uloop News

Join the Uloop News Team

Discuss This Article

Get Top Stories Delivered Weekly

Back to Top

Log In

Contact Us

Upload An Image

Please select an image to upload
Note: must be in .png, .gif or .jpg format
OR
Provide URL where image can be downloaded
Note: must be in .png, .gif or .jpg format

By clicking this button,
you agree to the terms of use

By clicking "Create Alert" I agree to the Uloop Terms of Use.

Image not available.

Add a Photo

Please select a photo to upload
Note: must be in .png, .gif or .jpg format