Friday, October 30, 2015

Tutoring Tips: Handling Parents (part 2 of 2)


When meeting with the parents for the first time, show them how you will be handling their child’s lessons.  Inform them about your method and style of teaching.  This would also avoid any misunderstanding about your methods in the long run. 

To check on the development of the child and if the goals are being met, you can schedule regular meetings with the parents.  During these meetings, parents should be informed about the status of their children, any difficulties or challenges the child is having, and any changes about how or when the goals will be accomplished.

• Communicate plans to the parents.

Some tutors would actually maintain a healthy working relationship with the tutees teacher.  This would make tutoring sessions in sync with the regular classes. This would also allow children to have same educational goals inside and outside school.  Then it is important to communicate regularly with the teachers, there are many forms of communications anyway, like email, phone calls or personal visits.

Hearing these plans is very important for parents.  This would actually signify how serious you are in helping their children improve academically.  This would also make them trust you more and provide better references in the future.

• Overall healthy communication is important.

Communication does not only involve goal-setting and updating, once a while.  You do not just convey and teach lessons.  There are studies that showed that children that receive attention, support and guidance are less likely to develop stress.  You, as a tutor, would need to talk to your tutees about their feelings and help them in dealing with it, if possible.

It would also be great to inform parents about the stress that you are detecting from their kids.  Parents, because of busy work schedule and responsibilities, tend to oversee their children’s stress.  This is why it is necessary to inform them about any stress or problems that they may have.

In tutoring, it is unavoidable that you would be dealing with different kinds of parents.  There are parents that are easily satisfied, while there are others that would be extremely demanding.  Everything just comes down to a single effective method, that is open communication.

No comments:

Post a Comment