Being a personal tutor is a real privilege that provides tutors with unique opportunities to work closely with individual students and to develop ongoing and rewarding relationships with them. As part of this, tutors gain valuable insight into how their tutors are doing in terms of engaging with the curriculum, understanding the content, and engaging more broadly with the university community. By having one-on-one and small-group tutoring of tutors, personal tutors can gain valuable learning about the student experience and the challenges faced by their tutors in combining study with work, family, and caregiving responsibilities. A personal tutor is someone who is already established in the academic community that tutors join, and can also provide access to Spires online dissertations tutors for additional support. As such, a personal tutor can be a powerful role model for tutors in terms of modeling language and shared behaviors in particular academic and professional communities.
Using a little tutoring time to get your tutors to start “thinking like a nurse” or “talking like an elementary school teacher” is one aspect of the personal tutor role, which is worth developing. Part of the role of the personal tutor is to support the personal and professional development of their tutors, as well as to deal with problems or issues. Personal tutors are highly qualified academic staff members with different professional skills and experiences who commit to supporting their well-being, but are not trained to be specialized counselors or advisors. UCL has staff trained in all of these areas and your personal tutor will be able to guide you to further support or specialized guidance, when needed, and to discuss how difficulties may affect your studies.
Private tutors provide personalized educational assistance to elementary and secondary school students or adults. As an elementary school tutor, you can help children (first grade) improve their reading, writing or math skills. As a high school tutor, you can help students (grades 9-1) with English, History, Science, Mathematics, French, or other subjects. Adult tutors can teach literacy, English or other languages or other subjects.
You're usually self-employed and run a tutoring business. You may also work for a company that specializes in tutoring services or a community literacy organization. You can work from your own home, your students' home, or a local meeting place, such as a library or community center. The students were asked to explain the importance they perceived of the role of the personal tutor during their stay at the university and to provide their own definition of the personal tutor.
The fact that the role of the personal tutor is generally ill-defined makes it difficult to identify where the role of academic tutor ends and where the role of personal tutor begins.
Personal mentoring
and coaching can be considered separate, but the model of the outstanding personal tutor includes elements of coaching within it. The key issue that emerged from staff responses on the role of the personal tutor was the question of student boundaries and expectations. This predetermined interest in personal mentoring could create bias in the data that was collected from staff participants.The new model moves the University from its current system of personal tutors to a counselling system in each school. Learn more about the key aspects of the Personal Tutor role, conducting tutorials, and communicating effectively with tutors. Factors that staff identified as factors affecting their confidence in supporting students reflect those identified by McFarlane (201) and include lack of experience, handling complex support needs related to personal and mental health issues, and lack of clarity of central support services for students or when to recommend students for additional support. McIntosh and Grey (201) suggest that personal tutoring can be considered simply as providing “tea and sympathy” to tutors, but they are clear that a good personal tutor-tutor relationship is not based on a deficit model in which the tutor “fixes” the student, but on a relationship in which tutors have responsibilities for try to solve their own difficulties.
This includes setting the boundaries of what a personal tutor can and cannot do, creating boundaries that did not exist before. The analysis of the experiences of staff and students in personal mentoring provided insight into the shared understanding of the challenges of personal mentoring that needed to be addressed. This reflects the findings of Thomas (200) on the broad role of the personal tutor in supporting students in a wide range of subjects. Therefore, it is not appropriate to assume that time and experience increase confidence in personal mentoring roles.
Staff were invited to complete the questionnaire at the end of an NLS staff development training session on personal mentoring, to try to avoid the problem of low response rates (Cohen, Manion and Morrison). Active research was considered appropriate for this project, as it provides an opportunity to reflect on and improve personal tutoring practices, taking into account the views of both staff and students when developing recommendations.
