What Makes An Effective Tuition

Learner differentiation in accordance to their abilities in my view is the most crucial issue for effective teaching and learning and hence in my first online session I assess my students` knowledge and skill baseline. In doing so I consider two main issues:

1- Student`s academic baseline (i.e. the pre-requisite knowledge)
2- Student`s learning mode preferences (i.e. visual, audio, kinaesthetic ...)

The teaching mode will have to be adjusted to benefit everyone. I believe that with appropriately matched teaching strategies and the correct support in place, all students should be able to attain their learning goals. Learning is an active process in which meaning is constructed by individual students through interaction with me and through problem solving.

In order for students to engage and remain engaged with their learning, they need to see its relevance, to understand clearly what the lesson will consist of and what they are expected to know, or be able to do. It is also important for them to have direct one to one feedback about their achievements. Online communication is very accessible and convenient which makes it the most effective channel for providing the student with feedback using the medium and techniques that IT offers.

Although the initial efforts in teaching and learning must be placed on assisting learners to reach the stage of `Application`, which is the third progression stage according to Bloom`s Taxonomy, the extent of online classroom should encourage higher order thinking including `Analysis`, `Synthesis` and `Evaluation`. Online classrooms and whiteboards are great medium for blending variety of thought provoking resources very fast.

I am a believer of providing a blended teaching provision to my learners. This provides my students who are from a range of abilities with numerous opportunities to take advantage of my knowledge which has been presented in a variety of teaching modes and via a variety of medium. My Online classrooms is designed to enable me to include variety of different resources into my lessons at a click of a button.

I also believe that student motivation plays a big factor in student achievement and progress. For greater student motivation the following objectives must be achieved.

1- Attention: lessons must be interesting and fulfilling
2- Relevance: applications of what is being discussed must also be considered
3- Confidence: learners must be given ample opportunities to achieve whereby their confidence grows
4- Satisfaction: praises must be the consistent flavouring agent of any teaching and learning session

In accordance to Hilgard’s cognitive theory of teaching principles the organization of knowledge should be from simplified wholes to more complex wholes. Hence I design my schemes of work and lesson plans to deliver a sequence of meaningful wholes (concepts) which together make up the bigger picture. This means that learner resistance towards a new concept is mostly due to their lack of full understanding or forgetting the pre-requisite concepts. This also means that flexibility of delivery has to be built into the teaching to allows frequent revisiting of the concepts. For this to be done efficiently so that more up to date students are not bored and those who need up dating are not stretched, in online teaching we can resourcefully take advantage of the power of IT.

I believe that learning is an emotionally charged process and hence it is vital that learners feel supported in their endeavour to conquer the challenges ahead of them. In an online teaching and learning environment the emotional pressure is enormously reduced. Students are less worried about making a mistake when learning online as opposed to face to face lessons. Also learners should not remain stagnated in their progress and in dealing with a difficulty can prevent them to move on and feel confident about their progress. This is another strength of online tuitions where short drop in sessions can be organised to ensure that students are continuously moving forward.