How is Tutoring Like Coaching?

We were inspired by a recent article in The New Yorker, in which Atul Gawande, a surgeon, decides to improve his performance in the operating room. He enlists the help of a colleague to observe him during surgery and act as a coach. I asked some of our tutors: How is tutoring like coaching? 


I feel like tutoring is a combination of coaching and teaching. When you're tutoring a student, you begin by teaching content: you either teach the student a new concept, or review something they might have already covered at school. 

Then coaching comes in. You will give the student problems they struggle with, but as the coach you have to sit back and allow them to struggle so they can learn the concept. Think about athletic coaches, like Andy Roddick's tennis coach. Do you think when Andy is at practice and struggles or makes a mistake, his coach jumps in and shows him how to do it? No. He might verbally give him tips, but he never jumps in, takes the racket, and shows him exactly how to do it. 

Tutoring is the same. We need to give students a chance before we jump in and help. They need to learn independence and build confidence because when they sit down to take a test and struggle with a problem, we won't be there to jump in and help them. They need to show confidence in themselves and their knowledge so they can tackle the challenging problems they come across.

-Lauren F.

After a tutoring session, I want my student to feel like they learned something new, useful and relevant. I want them to feel energized and excited about what they learned. If they get frustrated, I want them to know that if they keep working at it, they WILL eventually "get" it and succeed. I don't want to give the student all the answers or be their crutch. I want to teach them strategies and ways to approach their work that will ultimately help them be successful when I'm not there. 

Similarly, as a coach, you want to give your players the strategies, practice and skills to be strong players. You want your players to love the game, but you also don't want them to give up when things get tough. You know you can't play a game for a player - you need to teach them how to successfully play the game on their own.

-Alyssa D.

A coach is a fundamental to the success of a sports team. They help organize the team, encourage and motivate the players, and create systems and strategies to help them succeed. An academic tutor is very similar. Instead of helping with a sport, a tutor helps students succeed in school. An outside person providing students with strategies, encouragement, and organization when necessary can really help them succeed! When you think about sports coaches, there isn't a question in your mind about how much they help. Why would it be any different for academics? 

-Marianne C.

Why I Started To Teach

I think a lot of us have a difficult time imagining exactly what we will be like as adults when we’re young. When I think about my younger self, I was pretty unimaginative about what I thought the future could hold.  Perhaps it was because I was on the timid side and felt intimidated by a lot of things. If you had told me as a kid that I would one day be a classroom teacher or work with students, I’m not sure I would have believed you.  

I was the kid in 7th grade who struggled like crazy in math and had to go in after school to see the teacher (a lot). Sometimes I felt bad for my teacher because I was in there so often. I also couldn’t help but feel that surely there was something wrong with me if I needed this much help until one day my teacher said to me, “I hope my daughter is just like you” (she was expecting a baby girl at the time). That short statement made such an impression on me and gave me a lot to think about. Fast forward to high school and I was asked to help out with grade school students at my church’s summer camp. It was so much fun - I was hooked and starting helping out the following summers. In college, I was asked by one of my instructors if I would consider tutoring other students. I gave it a try and ended up really enjoying it. These are just some of the events that fostered my love of education at an early age.

The bottom line is, I had some really great people in my life who saw something in me and gave me the opportunity to try things I wouldn’t have thought of doing on my own. I needed a major confidence booster and outlets to see what I was capable of as a young person. At Nurturing Wisdom, we focused on one of our values in October: “Pursue Growth and Learning.” I’m convinced that we all grow stagnant and lose excitement if we’re not stretching ourselves. I also think that part of pursuing growth and learning is about helping others through this process. Is there a young person in your life who could really flourish from some of the things I was fortunate enough to have experienced through the adults in my life? While you’re pursuing your own growth and learning, is there anyone in your life whom you can encourage to do the same?         

What If the Secret to Success is Failure?

We were fascinated by this New York Times article, written by Paul Tough. He profiles Dominic Randolph, the headmaster at The Riverdale School in New York City. The article discusses character and how it's possible to teach it.

For the headmaster of an intensely competitive school, Randolph, who is 49, is surprisingly skeptical about many of the basic elements of a contemporary high-stakes American education. He did away with Advanced Placement classes in the high school soon after he arrived at Riverdale; he encourages his teachers to limit the homework they assign; and he says that the standardized tests that Riverdale and other private schools require for admission to kindergarten and to middle school are “a patently unfair system” because they evaluate students almost entirely by I.Q. “This push on tests,” he told me, “is missing out on some serious parts of what it means to be a successful human.”

Read the rest of the article here!

Tutor Spotlight: Brian Pyle

Brian has been tutoring with Nurturing Wisdom for over a year. He has a degree in psychology from Purdue and is currently finishing his master's in secondary education at DePaul. He is energetic, engaging and eager to help his students succeed!

The summer before high school, my parents decided that I needed tutoring for my organizational skills, or lack thereof. I had always been a decent student, but my lack of organization and study skills kept me from attaining the level of scholarship that I was capable of. Of course now I fully realize this, but back then I didn’t want to hear it. I remember being angry with my parents about tutoring, and not having the best attitude walking into my first session. When I actually met my tutor, it turned out that we had a lot of the same interests: sports, guitar, sketching and video games, just to name a few. I realized that my tutor was actually a cool guy, as opposed to the image I had built up in my head. I had never had a favorite teacher, or even one that I would approach before or after class, but in 5 minutes my tutor shattered my view of educators. He definitely had a hand in helping me decide that I wanted to pursue education as a career.

When I look back at how and why this tutor had such an impact on me, I realize that while the content he was teaching me was valuable, it was his attitude and openness that made him so memorable. Having that conversation with me let me know that this experience would be different. It showed me that I would be the focal point, and that my tutor genuinely cared about how I performed and whether I fully understood something.

Fast forward to today. I have been with Nurturing Wisdom for just over a year, and by far my favorite part of my journey with any student is the first session. I love breaking the ice with a student and letting them know that I am interested in their interests. I think that letting my students see me as a person instead of a just a tutor helps, which is why I take a vested interest in what they are doing outside of tutoring as well. Whether it’s a Boy Scout trip, football game, family vacation or a job, letting a student know that you are invested in them helps to build that student/tutor relationship. This approach led me to a career in education, and I look forward to continuing to have these rewarding experiences.

Surface & Deep Structure

My 7-year-old son and I were watching my older child compete in a track meet. It was a chilly day, and we’d been standing outside, huddled under our coats, for about an hour. As we stood at the fence waiting for the next event to begin, my son sighed, looked up at me and said, “Mom, I’m bored.”

The teacher in me always looks for moments like these to squeeze in some mental activity, so we started talking about the track.

“Do you know how many meters long the track is?” I asked. He shook his head. “It’s 400 meters,” I said. “So when a runner does one lap around the track, he runs 400 meters.”

That seemed to make sense to him, so I figured I’d start off with an easy problem. “All right,” I said, “so if a runner does two laps around the track, how many meters is that?”

I’ll never forget the look of surprise on his expressive face. Shaking his head, his brow knit with genuine confusion, he responded, “What? Mom, I don’t know. We’ve studied meters before in school, but we’ve never studied tracks!”

This time, it was my turn to be surprised. My son was in 2^nd grade, so I knew he had the arithmetic skills necessary to compute 400 + 400. But for some reason, he didn’t recognize that this was just an addition problem. I smiled and crouched down next to him so we could talk through how to get the answer. But in the back of my mind, I was at work on a problem of my own: why was he so baffled by what I thought would be a simple problem?

The answer, I found, lies in the concepts of structure of problems, explained by Willingham in his book Why Don’t Students Like School?

Word problems, such as the one I gave to my son, all have two elements to them: their surface structure and their deep structure. We adults recognize immediately that the ‘laps around the track’ problem is, at its core, an addition problem; that is, its deep structure is an addition problem. The fact that we’re talking about meters on a track does not change what we do to solve the problem. Actually, we could quite easily think of dozens of ways to “disguise” problems with the same deep structure:

• If there are 2 gallons in 1 jug, how many gallons are in 2 jugs?
• If you need 3 eggs to bake 1 cake, how many eggs do you need for 2 cakes?
• If there are 5,280 feet in 1 mile, how many feet are in 2 miles?
• If there are 20 ziggiblops in 1 splutzik, how many ziggiblops are in 2 splutziks?
• If there are 12 # in 1 ^, how many # are in 2 ^?

The “disguise” is the surface structure of the problem. And, as you probably noticed in the last two examples, the surface structure need not even be familiar (or pronounceable) for you to recognize the deep structure and solve the problem.

The disconnect that arose for my son is that while he had the skills and knowledge necessary to solve the problem, he got hung up on the surface structure of the problem – laps around a track, which he had never formally studied – and failed to recognize the deep structure – addition, something he’s been practicing for months on end.

Being able to apply knowledge to new and unfamiliar problems is called transfer, and it’s something that we teachers and parents try to encourage in our kids. But, as you may have noticed with your own kids, knowledge transfer isn’t easy. There are reasons why it’s tough, and there are things we can do to promote knowledge transfer – but we’ll get into those another time. For now, see what you can do identify the surface and deep structures in problems you encounter – and have patience with your kids (or yourself!) during the countless repetitions of problems that will be necessary for successful transfer of knowledge.

-Sara McGuinn, Northshore Tutoring Director