Plan Or React?

Staying in the zone of student interest

Do you plan to teach specific things during sessions or react as things come up? I think most tutors do a little of both, but my position on this question is pretty extreme.

I don’t make any plans to teach any particular concept or technique. I have no textbook. I don’t analyze student work before we meet. Everything I teach is a reaction to something that comes up in the session.

This approach has evolved over time, mostly in response to what interests students.

• Hearing me explain something they already know? Not interested.

• Hearing me explain something they might need to know? Probably not interested.

• Hearing me explain something they recently missed and don’t know? Very interested.

As a result, I am very careful to only explain things that a student can’t figure out on his own. Suppose a student missed a question about graphing parabolas. I would not launch into my five minute talk on the various ways you can shift quadratics and other functions (even though I always enjoy giving that talk). How tedious it would be to sit through five minutes of my rambling when he just needed 10 seconds of instruction! Maybe the student just made a small mistake. Maybe he just needs to know one variation. Instead I’ll ask, “How were you thinking about this one?” He’ll reveal what he knows, and I’ll teach him the rest.

The whole session proceeds in this way. I try to get the student to reveal a question he’d like me to answer, either through homework results or conversations like the one above, and then I use that opportunity to teach him as much as I can. But even in those explanations, I’m forcing the student to “drive the car” as much as possible. In teaching my student how to graph parabolas, I will ask questions like, “What would happen if this number was +2? What would that graph look like? What if this other one was -3?” And so on.

Students like showing what they know, they like proving to themselves (and me) that they can do new things, and they like getting help when they are stuck. I want to stay in that zone of student interest for the entire session. Responding to a student’s questions while he drives ensures that I do.

I’ll admit there is a risk to this approach: What if my student crashes the car?

I tried to get Gemini to make the driver male (matching my randomly-chosen pronoun), but it removed the head entirely, so I went back to this image.

For example, a student who is scoring 590 should not be worried about the very hardest math question on his recent SAT. It will take too long to explain and too much time to maintain his understanding over time. But what if he asks anyway?

This brings up two important points for those who want to use this approach in sessions. 1) You have to be good at dodging questions you don’t want to answer. “Let me write that one down. It’s super hard and probably not worth reviewing right now, but I want to make a note of it so that we can come back later.”

2) You have to be very careful about what you assign. This one is even more important, because it obviates the first. Ideally, you would only assign questions that you would be happy to review. If a question is irrelevant, or too easy, or too hard, then you shouldn’t include it in the assignment (unless it’s a mock test).

I’ve heard one other objection to this approach: How do you know you’ll cover everything important? But I would turn that question around. If you’re assigning the right things – official practice tests, targeted practice in the most important areas of the test – how would it not show up? How could a topic be super important and yet never turn up as a missed question in sessions? Either you aren’t assigning important topics or the student isn’t missing them.

If you assign carefully, you can get the student to ask the question that you want to answer. For example, let’s say that a student is not using a reading technique that I think is really important – he always looks at the answers right away (I want him to think of his own answers first). But if I give him some very difficult reading questions that can only be answered correctly by using the proper technique, he may be forced to ask, “How come I keep getting these wrong?” And then I can teach him my technique.

I suppose you could say that an assignment like this is a form of lesson planning, but it is different in one important way: the student has the opportunity to avoid my lecture. If my student gets every question right, I’m not going to plow ahead with the lesson I thought he needed.

Anyway, I’m curious to hear what everyone else thinks about this. Does everyone do this, or am I missing something?

One quick note: It would be different if I taught groups, or if my students did very little homework, or if I didn’t get to see them very many times, or if mine were particularly low-scoring students.

But I only teach one-on-one. I see students ~20 times for one hour each. They do ~3 hours of homework for me between sessions. And they tend to start somewhere in the high 400s to mid 600s on SAT sections (or have equivalent scores on other tests).