A chat about tutoring and a coffee: Customer service

A chat about tutoring and a coffee: Customer service

Our reputation is so important when we start tutoring. I believe it starts so long before we find our first student by being helpful. At the end of the day we are all very ego-centric, it is a quality that seems to make us human. So, we need to present ourselves with helpfulness as our go to first thought. What can I offer today that someone might find helpful? Here is a book I read that you might find interesting. Here is a website that might be helpful. Would this technique help your child with... Smile and make them feel seen and appreciated, not just like an inconvenience who has signed up and now has to be delt with (yawn) We all have stories to tell, good and bad but think about these as you grow your tutoring business, which do you want to model yourself on. What do you want to be known for. Often it is the smallest of details that make the biggest difference like taking your shoes off as you go into someone's home, or asking how their week has been. Stop and see them as a person. As cliche as it sounds: treat others as you would like to be treated yourself

Coffee and a Tutoring Chat: Working with the child in front of you today

I think we sometimes come to a lesson with preconceived ideas. This was something I learned as a child when every teacher that had encountered my brother would point out that I'm not as clever as him... There is also the danger that we have preconceived ideas about the child that we are working with: a dyslexic child will struggle to spell. A child on the spectrum will want to follow the same routine every time. A child with ADHD will struggle to concentrate. But I think for everyone, we have good days and bad days. Days where we feel like we have the world on our shoulders and days when we feel like we could move mountains. If that is the case for the child you are working with, embrace that. Finish 5-minutes earlier and end on a high. Add 5-minutes so that you don’t crush the momentum that you have been building. Work with that child you see before you, not the preconceived idea of who you think it should be. I recently wrote a book: Become a Tutor. Build Confidence. Change Lives. It answers the questions that I had when I first started tutoring. If you would like a free copy (no strings attached just a gift from me to you) drop me an email at info@clarajamestutoring.co.uk [info@clarajamestutoring.co.uk] and I will happily drop a copy in the post for you

We don't just share best practice. We create it together: Building the Clara James Franchise

I've been thinking a lot recently about how ideas travel. In many organisations, someone at the top has a great idea. That idea gets passed down through layers of management. By the time it reaches the people actually doing the work every day, it often looks very different from what was originally intended. Not because anyone did anything wrong. Simply because every time information passes from one person to another, a little context is lost. I don't want to build Clara James like that. I don't want a franchise where I sit in an office deciding what every tutor should do, creating resources in isolation and assuming they'll work for every child. Because that would contradict everything I believe about education. If every child is different... Then every tutor will also bring different experiences, strengths and ideas. One tutor might discover a brilliant way of explaining fractions. Another might create an incredible spelling game. Someone else might find the perfect way to support a child with exam anxiety. Why would we keep those ideas to ourselves? The franchise I'm building isn't about saying, "Here's the manual. Off you go." It's about building a community of tutors who learn from one another. Who celebrate successes together. Who bring challenges to the table. Who ask questions without fear of judgement. Who create resources together. Who constantly improve what we do because every tutor sees something the rest of us haven't yet noticed. The goal isn't to have one person with all the answers. The goal is to build a team that keeps discovering better ones. Because when we combine our ideas, experiences and creativity, every child benefits. And ultimately, that's why we're here. Not to create the perfect tutoring system. But to become better at seeing, understanding and supporting the unique child sitting in front of us.

A Tutoring chat and a coffee - Getting your first students

Putting yourself out there as a tutor takes a lot of commitment. Always in the back of your mind knowing that no-   one may be interested. Each day you put one foot in front of the other and keep going in the belief that today will be the day! But then you put out your next post and once again it feels like you are shouting into the void and all you hear back are the echos of silence. You decide to put on a brave face, you believe you can do this. Just 1 more attempt. Then something in life happens that you have no control over. Probably something completely unrelated to the business that you are trying to build and it stops you in your tracks. A part of you thinks why am I bothering with this. It feels like time to quit. To admit defeat and accept it's harder work than you ever anticipated. I know exactly how you feel. I was there with the tutoring at times over the years and now with building the franchise. You see other people and they make it look so easy. The truth is, most people don’t share this part.  The posts met with silence. The no replies. The self-doubt. But this is the part that everyone goes through - whether they admit it or not   But I suspect everyone has their down days. Just take a day to give yourself a break (a couple of years back whilst Hay was at Uni, I jumped on the next train to London and met her for lunch. This was extreme it may be just an episode of a program you enjoy with a cup of tea) and start again tomorrow. The secret to the success is to keep going, no matter how many "1 more attempts" you need, keep taking them because one day you will get that call, then another and you have started to live the dream that a couple of months back felt so far out of reach. If you’re at that stage where you’re thinking “is this even worth it?”  you don’t have to work it out on your own. But actually, it only takes one or two people to know what you are doing and to spread the word for you and you will suddenly take traction, and things will start to happen. You may decide to offer a couple of lessons for free to help speed the process up.   One of the things that I also did was to have magnets on the side of my car so that when I was in someone’s house tutoring, people would see it and it was a conversation starter. Not long after I started, I was working at a child’s home and one evening the mum went out to dinner with friends. The magnets had started a conversation which led to both parents phoning the next morning to ask for support for their sons. I still work with the niece of one of those families now and they have each spread the word for me more times than I can mention. I was also lucky enough to tutor the local lolly-pop lady’s daughter. (I was lucky because a) they are a really lovely family, but b) the lolly-pop lady knows every family in the village and became one of my biggest and loudest cheerleaders).  All it took was a couple of bits of “luck” and I was off. So, hold on and luck will find you out. As I say, it takes time and effort, it’s not easy, but it is most definitely worth it.   I recently wrote a book: Become a Tutor. Build Confidence. Change Lives. It answers the questions that I had when I first started tutoring. If you would like a free copy (no strings attached just a gift from me to you) drop me an email at info@clarajamestutoring.co.uk [info@clarajamestutoring.co.uk]

Is tutoring about our success or the child that we are working with?

I had had a conversation with a tutor earlier this evening that has left me fuming. He is generally a fantastic tutor, but on this I did not agree with him. He had spoken to a mum about supporting her daughter. She was in the top set but might be moved down. But, she needed a grade 6 in her exams. In the initial conversation it had come up that she is dyslexic, doesn't know her times tables and can't tell the time. The reason he rang was to say he was setting himself up for failure with her. I asked whether this was about her failure or his? He responded: "both" Reading between the lines, I think it was fear of a hit to his ego, but... I pointed out that may be I have dyscalculia and I can't do my times tables or read the time off a clock. But, give me a more complex worded question and because of how my brain works more holistically I can pick it and part and come back with the answer with relative ease. When was the last time you saw a higher paper where it asked you a simple times tables question, or to read the time on the clock? That's more likely to be asked on a foundation paper, so maybe it is the foundation paper that would set her up to fail. Without ever having met her, we can not judge. A girl I worked with last year pointed out that maybe if classes were segregated according to learning style rather than "ability" there would probably be a lot more high achievers in the education system. Another mum of a lad I worked with a couple of years back got in touch after the exams. I hadn't realised at the time that he had been expected to fail maths. He was in the higher paper. After the results day she got in touch and said thank you. She stated that he had been so disillusioned with the educational system and felt that he was a failure. But because someone had explained something in the way that he understood it, it had made a difference. At first in maths and then other subjects too. She said he'd never expected him to go to college but the goal was just to survive school. He got an 8 in maths. An A in A' level maths and is now doing maths and computer science at university. If we don't prejudge a person we can make a huge difference. And that is what tutoring should be about. Not our ego and our pass rate, but helping the child sat in front of us to meet their full potential. That is the type of person I want to have working with us and representing the Clara James Brand. That is what I want us to be know for/ remembered as.