Tutoring Matters: Everything You Always Wanted To Know About How To Tutor

by Jerome Rabow, Tiffani Chin, Nima Fahimian

Inside each of us is the promise of a tutor. If you've ever taught a child to tie her shoe, or helped a friend with his homework, or even helped a stranger understand a posted sign, you have it in you to empower others through learning. Tutors are allowed to do what teachers and parents are often not able to do. They can be patient, observe, question, support, challenge, and applaud. They can move towards nurturing the true and total intelligence of their tutees. Learning to tutor is simply overcoming fears, sharing and acquiring knowledge, and appreciating the potential and wisdom in each other. "Tutoring Matters" is the authoritative manual for both the aspiring and seasoned tutor. Using firsthand experiences of over one hundred new and experienced tutors, this long-awaited guide offers chapters on attitudes and anxieties, teaching techniques, and building relationships. It educates the tutor on how to handle and appreciate social and language differences; how to use other adults - teachers, administrators, parents, employers - to a student's advantage; and, when your student or circumstances determine that it's time, how to put a positive and supportive end to the tutor-tutee relationship. Written by experienced tutors and tutoring educators, Tutoring Matters celebrates - and provides just the right tools for - an individualized and successful tutoring relationship and shows just how much you can learn - about the world and yourself - through teaching others. Author Jerome Rabow, the recipient of numerous distinguished teaching awards, is co-author of "Cracks in the Classroom An Analysis with Readings". He is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Tiffani Chin is an experienced tutor and Ph.D. Candidate researching education and sociology at UCLA. Nima Fahimian, also an experienced tutor, studies medicine at the UCLA School of Medicine.

Genres: Education

188 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

Jerome Rabow, the recipient of numerous distinguished teaching awards, is co-author of Cracks in the Classroom Wall: An Analysis with Readings. He is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Reviews

[Jade · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tutoring Matters is a thoroughly helpful and enjoyably compact book on the best strategies for tutoring. In each chapter, the authors provide tips on what you should do and how you should respond in certain tutoring situations, including real-life examples culled from tutors' field notes. The topics range from dealing with the initial anxieties of starting a tutoring relationship, to embracing differences and commonalities, to finding and adapting tutee interests into your tutoring, to even handing the tutee's parents and teachers.

It's a generalized guide perfect for anyone starting or already engaged in the tutoring process that wants to improve their tutoring while also learn from the experiences of others. As an aspiring tutor, reading this book was a great benefit to me as it illuminated some aspects of tutoring I may not have even considered such as how to handle saying goodbye to a tutee and how not to bring gifts as motivators.

The biggest takeaway, though? Two little words that the book stresses you have in any tutoring situation - unconditional acceptance. That's something everyone can learn from.

[jacky · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read some of this during my practicum for my master's. I remember that at the time I found the information mildly helpful, but I don't remember anything specific about it now a few months later.

[Suzanne · Rating 2 out of 5]

Focused on tutoring younger children--I did like the ending chapter which was 20 things every tutor should know/do.