Tutoring as a Team Sport and as a Collaborative Art

A tutor should not behave like just another teacher (whiteboard instruction, lesson plans, quizzes and tests), but must think of herself as a cross between an athletic coach and an acting teacher. What is at stake is not necessarily the intellectual, but the physical, the psychological, and the creative. Coaches train the body to develop coordination and skill; acting teachers train the body to develop expressiveness. Coaches inspire and excite; acting teachers fire the imagination. 

Both analogies are essential in moving a student beyond just “knowing the answer” and “getting it right.” They can transform studying into a sport and an art.

1. An athletic coach teaches players to adjust footwork, communicate effectively with teammates, and make strategic decisions instinctually—among many other things. Inculcating these skills requires careful observation of a player’s physical and mental dispositions, after which the coach designs drills to prepare players for competition. A soccer coach, for example, knows that not every attempt is going to yield a goal, but that by adjusting the way a player strikes the ball or passes the ball, the chance of scoring a goal goes up. Seeing an imbalance or an underdeveloped skill, the coach has the player practice with his non-dominant foot to become more balanced. (Basketball coaches do the same for right-handed players attempting left-handed lay-ups.) A soccer coach also prepares players for competition by experimenting with different line-ups and running plays to help teammates communicate and develop timing. Soccer practices aim to exhaust players to build  endurance and stamina. 

A tutor does these same things—energizing students and increasing their chances of success. As I wrote in “How is Tutoring Different from Teaching,” a key difference between classroom learning and tutorials is that the tutor refuses to allow the student to be passive or silent (whereas the classroom dynamic too often forces students into those modes). A soccer coach knows that scoring a goal is not a theoretical exercise; likewise a tutor knows that studying is not an abstraction. The tutor (as coach) focuses on a student’s weaknesses and develops skill-building routines to strengthen the “hole” in the student’s study game. Sometimes, those skills may involve writing on a piece of paper, but they aren’t limited to a pencil and notebook (or a laptop or tablet). Memorization, for example, must be done actively, out loud, engaging all the senses.

The tutor-coach will have to figure out how a particular student-player best incorporates new information—visually, aurally, spatially, or kinesthetically. To reach mastery, it may be valuable to add physical challenges (balance on one foot, throw a ball back and forth without dropping it, do push-ups in between problems) to tax the body-brain as it strives to maintain focus and, crucially, retain information on a deep level. For an engaged student willing to push herself, the tutor might ask her to increase her tempo to see if she can maintain accuracy while working at a faster pace. Similarly, the tutor might deliberately make noise and cause other distractions to help the student develop heightened powers of concentration. If the tutor-coach sees the student-player communicating poorly with his peers or teachers, he will design a “play” for the student to follow in order to move through any confusion and maintain the momentum of learning. Even how to sit properly in a chair can be coached so as to make the best use of breath and energy. 

Think about how thoroughly sports metaphors permeate our everyday speech: “Keep your eye on the ball,” “Follow through with your swing,” “Slow and steady wins the race,” and “It’s time to take the training wheels off,” to name a few. These are useful because they encourage the student to engage with studying as an active process that involves hand-eye coordination, strength, speed, and balance. The tutor likely will never blow a whistle, but she may run the tutoring session as a sports practice—because turning studying into a game should yield palpable excitement. 

Go to any soccer field during a match and you may hear coaches—if not also enthusiastic parents—screaming at players from the sidelines. A tutor probably won’t ever do that, but sometimes she might want to: “Double check your formulas! Proofread your essay! Plan out your nightly work!” These should all be considered athletic commands aimed at quickening the heartbeat and engaging the entire body.

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2. An acting teacher guides the actor to develop his artistic instrument, helping him connect with what is inside him, find his way into a character, work dynamically with his scene partner, and commit himself to both the given circumstances of the story and to the farthest reaches of his own imagination. An acting teacher senses when the actor is holding back or is preventing himself from going where the scene requires. Acting teachers also know when the actor is trying so hard to drive the scene forward (impulsivity) that he isn’t leaving room for what he’s receiving from the other actor(s) in return (spontaneity). An acting teacher doesn’t expect every performance to be Oscar-Tony-Emmy-or-Obie-worthy. Rather, he helps his students develop their techniques, thus opening a pathway for creativity. In this way, the acting teacher cultivates the student’s innate talent by teaching craft.

Tutors should work the same way: to help each individual learner discover her raw abilities and to develop study habits that allow her to connect herself to her work. Acting training is filled with games designed to move students out of their habitual patterns and make them play roles they may never occupy in their real lives. Studying too, can become more play-based and creative—simply by reading aloud responsively, or using silly voices, a book’s characters can come alive in all their unique and conflicting perspectives. Reading aloud is how children first experience books. For most of human history, “reading” has actually been an aural experience, engaging the ear, which stimulates the brain. Even today, reading aloud is a must to hear Shakespeare’s musicality. And that’s only the beginning in terms of study games.

In STEM subjects, personalizing the process—not letting learning become data to be absorbed by rote, but turning new information into a story or even a song—transforms a student’s experience and makes her more engaged and responsive to the material. Simonides’ famous idea of the “Memory Palace” treats information not as static, but as spatial: it lives within the mental architecture of the individual learner, stored away and accessible. The tutor helps the student become aware of those internal palaces of thought and teaches how to construct them.

Acting teachers often employ a technique called “side-coaching”—they innocuously insert themselves into a scene that two actors are presenting and offer some advice or direction. Tutors are well positioned to do the same thing for students who, though they are engrossed in their work, are temporarily stuck. Side-coaching will be different for every student and every subject. During a science problem, it could be “You’re doing great; remember what we discussed about the Nitrogen cycle.” When writing an essay, it could be, “Find flow in drafting; don’t worry about every word being right for the moment.” For SAT prep, it could be, “I see you checking the clock a lot. You’re doing fine and you have plenty of time. Keep going through the problems the way we practiced.” These encouragements help keep the student in the work, moving forward and not giving up or becoming frustrated.

Acting teachers can also help actors play scenes by using a simple exercise called “as if.” To an actor playing Hamlet, a teacher might suggest, “Play the scene with your mother as if you have ants in your pants.” The instruction gives the actor something physical to do in the scene so he doesn’t worry about being angry or sad or loud, etc. A tutor should not fall into the trap of saying “think harder” or “be more careful.” Instead, using an “as if,” the tutor can creatively coach: “Work as if you are holding an egg”—an instruction intended to promote a sense of care and delicacy in the student’s body-brain. Not all students will be responsive to this kind of instruction, but its benefit is that it stimulates some part of the student’s inner instrument, offering a compelling idea which can be explored in personal ways and which is more useful than a commandment from an authority figure (kids hear plenty of those already). 

A final thought: athletic coaches and acting teachers both understand that, after extensively working with their players or actors, the endpoint of the training is to prepare the athlete/performer for the moment when she steps onto the field/stage and performs independently. So it is with the tutor. Accomplishing homework tasks together is only a relatively small part of tutoring. Guiding a student to self-awareness and self-discovery, demonstrating how to play with new material, activating the body as an instrument in the learning experience, and giving the student skills, reinforcement, inspiration, and confidence to move forward on her own is the true goal.