How one-to-one tutoring supports growing together moving forward from Children's Mental Health week
This year’s Children’s Mental Health Week focused on the importance of growing together and encouraged children, and the adults in their lives, to reflect on how they have grown and how they can support the growth of others. This is certainly timely, with the education industry prioritising the wellbeing of students after the last two, very difficult, years. Rebuilding and maintaining the mental health and wellbeing of students while providing high quality educational support is something that the in-home and online tutoring company, Tutor Doctor, firmly believes in and has incorporated into its DNA. As students work hard to build back learning lost to the pandemic, personalised, one-to-one tutoring can also support the growth of their confidence and the development of a growth mindset.
When students struggle academically, they face challenge after challenge, which impacts their ability to find the joy in learning and often leaves them feeling anxious and overwhelmed. Through the development of a growth mindset, students can flip the script and find a renewed love of learning, better understand their individual learning process, grow their confidence and self-esteem, and begin to see challenges as opportunities, rather than barriers to success. Tutoring supports students not only in building back lost learning foundations, but in building a growth mindset that will serve them well for their whole lives.
A wonderful example of this is Toby, a bright ten-year-old with a passion for cricket and who came to Tutor Doctor for support with learning maths. Toby had long struggled with the subject and that had resulted in an anxiety so strong, that Toby couldn’t even say the word “maths” aloud. Rather than focusing on the traditional way to learn maths, Toby’s tutor took an individualised approach that limited the direct focus on maths and allowed Toby to approach the subject through his love of cricket. By playing cricket during sessions and using the sport to illustrate and teach the foundations of numeracy, Toby was able to overcome his anxiety towards this long-feared subject. The positive role modelling and effective encouragement of his tutor, paired with the no pressure and low stress approach to maths allowed Toby to grow his mindset. This resulted in building back his confidence to allow him to see his potential, significantly reducing his anxiety, and helping him to see maths challenges as opportunities to grow his knowledge rather than sources of feelings of overwhelm, frustration, and fear. Toby and his tutor grew together. Toby grew his growth mindset and maths skills and his tutor grew their understanding of cricket and of how their compassion and support can make all the difference for a student like Toby.
Becky Ward, the Education Experience Specialist, believes growing together through promoting wellbeing, creating an emotionally supportive environment, and developing a growth mindset is the best way to supplement and encourage a student’s learning.
“When a student is struggling in school, it’s often assumed their academic abilities aren’t up to scratch or they’re not putting in the effort. However, a student’s challenge with learning is often much deeper than that. Here at Tutor Doctor, we believe the true goal of tutoring goes way beyond achieving a specific grade. Learning the subject content and how to apply it is vitally important, but supporting students in understanding their own learning process, building their confidence, and finding a love of learning is what will really lead to a student’s life-long success. We are encouraged by the educational sector’s focus on children’s mental health and wellbeing as a significant part of students’ educational journey. It’s been a very challenging period in children’s lives and we celebrate every student for all of their achievements, no matter how small they may seem.”
Students have been through so much in the last two years and they need the adults in their lives to help them understand where to go from here and how they will get there. Fostering a growth mindset in your child is one way you can help them to find their path on their educational journey again. Encouraging them to keep trying, to celebrate failures because it means they tried, to look at failures as a learning opportunity, and to evaluate their efforts rather than their results, will help your child to build back the confidence, self-esteem, and passion that the pandemic may have taken from them. Seeing the adults in their lives model how to view and approach challenges and to let go of the fear and anxiety about making a mistake can have significantly positive impacts on a child’s growth and development.
“One-to-one tutoring programmes allow children to show us as educators who they really are and what makes them tick. We all know no two children are the same, so their ways of growing and developing won’t be the same either. Enabling children to express themselves as they learn by offering them safe environments that are personal to them and where mistakes and failures are viewed as learning opportunities promotes healthy growth mindsets moving into the future,” continued Becky.
If you think your child education and wellbeing could benefit from high-quality, personalised tutoring, visit https://www.tutordoctor.co.uk/