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“A good teacher must be able to put himself in the place of those who find learning hard.” - Eliphas Levi
Whether you’re in a language class, private tutorials at home, catchup classes, or intensive classes, anyone of any age can improve themselves intellectually. More and more adults are opting to sign up for additional lessons in a variety of different subjects and paying for the help of a private tutor (like those on Superprof, for example). In recent years, the private tutoring market in the UK has continued to grow. Whatever the reasons, tutors for adults have continued to become more popular and have helped many adults to rediscover their self-confidence, learn new skills, get ready for exams, and master foreign languages. There are plenty of advantages to being a private tutor! Children aren’t the only ones who can benefit from learning new things and just because adults aren’t at school any more, it doesn’t mean that they can’t benefit from a bit of intellectual development. Private tutorials aren’t to make a student feel bad, but rather to help them become a better learner, learn new skills, and improve intellectually. In our fourth article on teaching private tutorials to adults, we're looking at what teaching adults entails, the advantages of teaching adults rather than children, how you can enjoy a more profound relationship with your students, and the different teaching approaches you can enjoy using when teaching adults.
What’s Involved in Teaching Private Tutorials with Adults?
“I don't love studying. I hate studying. I like learning. Learning is beautiful.” - Natalie Portman
Becoming a tutor for adults, be it in private tutorials, academic support classes, maths exam prep, or even job training can is often a hugely rewarding experience. In fact, children are often more restless and pay less attention than adults.
- Ease of learning
- Speed of assimilating new concepts
- Curiosity
- A genuine interest in their own progress
- A passion for what they’re being taught
- A real dialogue with their tutor
- Etc.
In short, an adult is an “easier” student to teach than a child for the above reasons. The tutor will have less to worry about with adult students than with children. For one, classroom management tends to be much easier with adults than with children. If you want to be an effective teacher of adults and a good educator, you're going to have to work on your own professional development, demonstrate a sound knowledge of different student learning strategies, implement engaging learning experience, create a good learning environment for students, and go about constantly improving the way you teach and your pedagogy. Keep in mind that you mightn't always have a curriculum to follow. In fact, this means that you'll have to be more creative with your teaching strategies. Whereas a school teacher has a clear outcome for the year, your job might be to help your student to succeed in less tangible ways.
Advantages of Teaching Adults: A Student That’s More Receptive to Lessons
Without putting children down, adult classes can be more enriching for teachers since their pupil will have a similar age to them. They can concentrate more and for longer than their younger counterparts and cover more topics during their lessons. You can find tutoring jobs here.
Advantages of Teaching Adults: Constructive Exchanges with the Tutor
Being more receptive means that the student is more involved in the lesson, unlike children and teenagers. This allows the tutor and student to regularly have more interesting discussions with one another. On the one hand, the tutor will always find themselves in front of an interested student who’ll ask more interesting questions, unlike what they probably get with young children and teens.
Advantages of Teaching Adults: Going Beyond Teaching
As you’ll have understood, teaching adults is stimulating and rewarding for both the tutor and the student. The relationship between the student and the teacher, due to having similar ages or both being adults, allows them to talk about things more easily and have engaging discussions on a given topic.
- Advance in their studies more quickly and fluidly
- Spend more time analysing complicated concepts more deeply
- Have more constructive and productive discussions in and out of the classroom
- Make more progress with effective teaching methods
- Improve their self-confidence
- Etc.
After all that, you’re probably thinking that teaching private tutorials adults isn’t such a bad idea after all. In fact, thanks to all these advantages, the relationship between the tutor and the adult student will be focused on work, trust, achieving goals, and, above all, enjoying the teaching and learning new things.
The difference between good teachers and great teachers is that great teachers engage their students through a variety of different learning styles and approaches, are meticulous in their preparation, monitor their students' progress with regular evaluation, and make their students' learning their most important objective.
If you're interested in teaching private tutorials to adults or students, you can quickly and easily make your tutor profile on Superprof. You just need to say what you teach and where you teach it and you can then start looking for students. There are three main types of tutorials you can offer: one-on-0ne private tutorials with just you and a single student, online private tutorials where you teach a student remotely via video conferencing software such as Skype, and group tutorials where you can teach several students at once, like in their place of work. The last option allows you to charge less per student but earn more per hour. However, you need to be far more adaptable in your teaching as you've got several students to keep happy at once.
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