The quest for an infinitely patient tutor
What makes for good tutoring? As a human tutor who works on an adaptive tutoring product, that’s a question I’m constantly challenged by. My answer? Patience. Bucketloads of it.
In a recent phone call, I found myself on the receiving end of a rant from a good friend. It seems his 8-year-old son was having some trouble with grasping order of operations. The friend lamented that his boy just doesn’t get maths (not like his older, more capable brother), and how infuriating it is to have to repeatedly explain such simple concepts. All this within earshot of said struggling child.
This litany of pedagogical woes exposes the damage inflicted on students when a tutor is void of patience.
A child’s confidence in their learning is so delicate; it must be threaded with care, understanding and, most of all, patience. The one sure-fire way to sabotage a child’s learning is to make them feel intellectually inferior. All it takes is a few words.
Even well-intentioned phrases can send a damaging signal: “he’s more of a creative guy”, “numbers aren’t really her thing”, “he’s a bit slower than most of his friends”. If one even hints that a child is deficient in any way, they will take it as gospel. Such words can induce a vicious cycle of low self-esteem, low effort (why bother if I’m not smart anyway?) and low attainment. The biggest danger is that the effect can go unnoticed. The prophecy is fulfilled and the parent feels vindicated in their judgement of the child.
Parents are by no means the sole culprits. All educators — school teachers, family members and hired help — are susceptible to projecting negative messages. Damaging messages even pervade every aspect of formal schooling.
Grouping students by ability and making snapshot judgements with narrow test scores impose toxic labels on students. The structures of mainstream education show a marked lack of patience in students’ development.
Parents deserve special attention because their words carry added significance with children. They come loaded with emotion and expectation. Their words stick. Children seek validation through their parents and latch on to their every word. A parent’s influence on their child’s confidence (and subsequently their achievement) is unavoidable.
Even parents who profess a hands-off approach to their child’s learning cannot avoid sharing their beliefs, hopes and frustrations — quite often publicly, with the child in full view.
Thus any problems with parental communication are endemic. It is critical that parents’ everyday messages reinforce positive beliefs and values. The education community has taken a positive step in embracing the role of a growth mindset, but much of this has taken root within the teaching profession. The same effort must be extended to parents.
The root of patience may be empathy and the ability to understand why a child is struggling. So cut the kid some slack, I told my friend. Order of operations can be pretty tough for an adult, let alone an eight-year-old. I urged him to remember that we were all kids once, and we each faced immeasurable struggle in learning the basic skills of life (unless you happened to pick up the habit of walking and speaking without any aids). And lastly, in a triumph of opportunism, I suggested he sign his son up to a certain adaptive tutoring programme.
Adaptive tutors have been lauded for exhibiting infinite patience. When a child gets stuck, the tutor adapts. It never gets angry or frustrated and never puts the child down (if designed well, anyway). This already sounds eerily similar to a monologue from Terminator 2 that pays tribute to the humanised aspects of Arnie’s cyborg.
So is the solution to outsource tutoring to machines that display superhuman levels of patience?
Hardly.
Any substitution model that depends solely on students’ temporary interaction with technology is inherently flawed. Parents (and educators) will always have a purchase on their child’s beliefs and values through the everyday messages they convey.
Education is a fundamentally human process and technology must exist in servitude of that goal. The patience of an adaptive tutor may be inexhaustible but, to state the obvious, it is also virtual. Attempting to side-line parents or educators is futile, for their day-to-day interactions will always reign supreme.
The deepest potential of adaptive tutors lies in amplifying the positive dynamics between children and their parents and educators. This informs the key challenge for innovators: how can tutors be developed to support parents and educators in reinforcing positive messages to their students? How can technology promote patience amongst parents? What does a growth mindset-enabling virtual tutor look like? These are serious, human-centred questions of design that the EdTech community must confront.
The quest for the infinitely patient tutor cannot be undertaken in solitude; parents and educators must be integrated into the solution.
Originally posted on my personal blog, www.fjmubeen.com
