An Educated Peer — An approach to tutoring

The role of the tutor is an important part of the learning process for the tutee. A tutor has to impose themselves as a go-to point of information but also reflect the fact that the tutor has been hired specifically for the student and is therefore, not a teacher, in the traditional sense anyway. This is due to the fact that teachers tend to be seen as authoritative figures, especially in classrooms where there are multiple students. This is natural with groups, but a tutor, dealing with only a single tutee in most cases, is therefore, something different. We’d like to say a tutor is more of an ‘educated peer’ than anything else.

An educated peer is someone who is a subject/knowledge expert but isn’t attempting to impose any form of authority onto the tutee. Put this in context of a tutor/tutee relationship, it allows the tutor to ‘take the teacher hat’ off with a tutee and to guide them, rather than lecture them. This is done by clarifying exactly what the tutee aims to improve on, if supplementing a subject, or if there’s anything specific about the subject they’re interested in, if you’re tutoring them the entire subject. This allows you the opportunity to then provide them with work suited to their own set learning goals; you also can remain as someone who is genuinely interested in seeing their progress and guiding them towards the correct answer, rather than telling them.

A tutor has the ability to allow a tutee to self-discover what they love about a subject, in a loose learning manner, as an educated peer guiding them towards the answer, rather than having to do so in a classroom, authoritative manner.

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