Top 5 Tips To Benefit Your First Online Tuition Lesson

So you’re beginning your tutoring voyage! We know online learning and especially, online tuition can be a very daunting task, so we’ve got your back. 

Here at Sherpa, we’ve created the top 5 tips for your first-ever online tutor lesson.

1. Get To Know Your Tutor

The student-tutor relationship is extremely important with regard to cultivating a proactive and knowledgeable working environment.

Getting to know your online tutor within the first stage of online lessons is crucially important.

Sherpa allows you to easily undergo this relationship by offering a free 20-minute introduction to get to know the tutors.

This means you can get to know the tutors you're interested in before even stepping into an online classroom with them.

It’s equally as important to let your tutor get to know you as well. They will need time to assess your strengths and weaknesses in order to help you in the most suitable way possible.

The more they can understand your personality, the more specific their plan can be.

2. Discover Your Optimal Learning Style

Every student learns in a slightly different manner.

It’s great to understand how your mind operates in order to convey this to your tutor. Although each learning style falls under one of three brackets:

• Auditory learner - When an individual learns most efficiently through listening. A person who is an auditory learner typically retains information better when the information is in auditory form such as through speech or sound. If you’re an auditory learner, it may be worth undertaking strategies such as recording lesson information or reading aloud when revising and learning.
• Kinesthetic learner - If you’re a kinesthetic learner, your way of processing information derives from touch and movement. Examples can be from building simulations to performing experiments. Students in this bracket tend to be far more active
• Visual learner - Obviously, visual learning means new material is learned through unique person-to-person experiences visually. These people prefer to look at things in order to absorb information. If you’re a visual learner always write down the information you hear and use key-coded colours.

It’s key to note that all students are not defined to one specific bracket, it’s more of a collection of these traits that most beneficially influences learning.

3. Set SMART Goals 

Settings goals/targets is important in all aspects of life. Most important of all, academic success. We need to understand where we want to go regarding our education. These goals should always be SMART:

Specific - General targets are always good for a certain direction or outcome but, how you arrive at these goals are down to specificity. What specific things can help you attain your general goal?

Measurable - Your targets should always be quantifiable in some way, in order to help you clearly identify when you have hit them.

Achievable - A goal should be a challenge but not impossible. If your target is too unachievable it can cause unnecessary stress.

Realistic - Setting impossible targets is not helpful, discuss with our tutor what is realistic for you.

Timely - Deadlines being exams and coursework dates are given in education. These give you incentives to get work done.

4. Prepare Before Your Online Lessons

There’s no point in seeing an online tutor if you have no idea what you’re studying in the first place.

For instance, if you have an online maths tutor there’s no point having a session about quadratics equations or Pythagoras' theorem without any prior understanding.

Whilst you could do this, ultimately it would be a waste of time for you and your online tutor to explain the basics of these concepts. 

Part of the importance of having a 20-minute meeting on Sherpa (for free!) is to discuss where you are at with your understanding and where you want to be. Then it's the tutors job to suggest a route to get you there!

5. Create An Action Plan

The student-tutor relationship is a team relationship.

You have to both be active and interact with each other to succeed in hitting your goals and achieving your academic potential.

This means that you should both come together before your first lesson (in your introduction) and devise a plan of action with targets and goals.

Be honest in answering a tutor's questions about your strengths and weaknesses - they are here to help and are working FOR you.

Over time they will learn to see areas you need to improve on that you may not have even noticed.

In order to find the right academic tutor, Sherpa handpicks its experienced tutors to grant the students the most successful learning environment.

To find your ideal fit, click the link provided.