I had a 7th-grade math teacher with 34 students in her math class. She was an excellent teacher, and I think only 12 students got the most out of her lessons.
There were many more students in the class who just didn’t have an interest in learning 7th-grade math and many more who were struggling with the material but too afraid to ask for help.
I still have a strong memory of my 7th-grade math teacher, who had 34 students in her class.
She was good at her job, and the material would be covered in a way that would work for 12 students in the class on any given day.
The rest of us would be either bored or lost. It would be quiet, and nobody would say anything in class for fear of admitting in front of 28 peers that they did not understand.
Nobody wanted to say that they were bored. Nobody wanted to say that they were lost.
I think this is a powerful perception of the group learning environment and the issues with group classes in general.
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5 Reasons One-to-One Tutoring Beats Group Classes
In positive situations, the group class can be truly electric. For example, when the material is hot, the class is working well, and there’s that rare ‘magnetic’ energy pulling the students in all different directions.
Everyone is pulling in the same direction: the teacher can teach, and the students can learn in a dynamic and truly unique way.
Most math classes are made up of students with different levels of math ability. Even the best teacher can only teach the average student in the class.
That means that the student above average will have to wait for the rest of the class to catch up, while the student below average will be pushed to keep up with the rest of the class.
Unfortunately, many students are left behind in typical math classes because the teacher is trying to reach the average student in the class.
The student who is having trouble with one concept will have to struggle with that concept for a long time before others even notice the struggle.
By the time others have even noticed the struggle, the student has already been practising the concept for 3 months or more.
In that time, the student could have developed a number of incorrect math practices for solving problems similar to the concept that they are having trouble with.
These incorrect math practices can become a part of the student’s math repertoire and be very difficult to change. Finding a tutor can help students who have fallen behind in math.
A tutor can work with a student one-on-one to find the student’s errors and to work through the errors with the student.
The tutor can help the student to get back on track in math and to learn the material correctly the first time. In addition to one-on-one tutoring, many students are also helped by after-school math programs, such as study hall, math lab, or tutoring groups.
These programs can give students the opportunity to get extra help with math when they need it. They can also help students to get organized and to stay on top of their school work.
For many students, after-school math programs are an important part of doing well in math. Because of this, these programs can be very valuable for students who are struggling in math or for students who want to get extra practice with math.
One-on-one tutoring rips out that constraint entirely.
What actually changes when it’s just you and a tutor
However, the greatest advantage of one-on-one tutoring over the group learning environment of a class is the feedback loop between tutor and student.
To make it clear, in a class with twenty-eight students, three days can go by before a student gets a clue as to a mistake made by the student while completing practice problems.
By the time this mistake is found, the mistake has been solidified into an error and has become a part of the student’s working knowledge of the area of mathematics being studied.
This can cause the student to continue practicing mistakes and give the student incorrect tools to use when practising very difficult math problems in that area of study. One-on-one tutoring however, can pinpoint this type of error within the span of a single problem.
In this case, the error is found before it is cemented into the student’s working knowledge and become a bad habit for the student to practice when completing similar types of math problems.
Lastly, I would note that there is a lot of value in being given permission to not know something in the first place. In a group class, it is common for a student to be afraid to ask for help in front of their peers. In one
I mentioned a moment earlier where students might be afraid to admit they don’t know something in front of their classmates. Even in high school there are many students who don’t want to admit confusion.
But in a one on one tutoring session there is no audience. In one on one tutoring there is no one to see a student reading and re-reading the same sentence over and over again. This allows students to admit what they need to admit and get the help that they need.
The change that is most amazing to me is that the kids who are so quiet in group sessions and don’t do any problems in class and don’t ask any questions start to open up and figure out their learning style in one-on-one sessions with a tutor.
And then suddenly they start to open up in group sessions and start to ask questions and do problems in class. It’s a really amazing thing to watch.
Pacing: The Thing Everyone Mentions But Few People Explain Well
A few days ago, I explained why tutoring is better than group classes. But, as I said there, that doesn’t mean that group classes are bad for their students.
Rather, they teach students to learn in a different way from one-on-one tutoring.
In a group class, students learn to absorb information and to learn in a social environment. Most importantly, they learn to calibrate themselves to keep pace with their fellow students.
It is very hard to slow down a group of students for one or two students, and very hard to speed up a group of students for the others. In a good one-on-one session, however, you can go at exactly the right pace for the student in front of you.
To lock step or not to lock step. This is the great pacing question of tutoring. Tutoring is, by its very nature, able to be locked step with a student. That is, a tutor can be working with a student and following their progress from session to session.
In terms of scope and sequence for each section of material, this means that the tutor can spend as many sessions as are required to insure that the student has a good grasp of the material for that section.
For example, the tutor might spend 4 sessions covering the section on fractions, but then only one session covering the section on measurements because the student “owns” that material already.
Lock step tutoring follows the student as opposed to the more typical model of group instruction that is locked step with a hypothetical average student and is calibrated to the middle of the bell curve.
The teacher therefore has to pace for the average student in order to serve the middle of the bell curve. In addition, in order to meet the requirements of the curriculum and to keep on track with the rest of the students, the typical model of group instruction has to follow a calendar.
As a result, the material is typically locked step and the tutor and students are locked into that calendar in order to keep on track with the rest of the students in order to complete the curriculum by the end of the year.
| Factor | Group class | One-on-one tutoring |
| Pacing | Set by curriculum or teacher | Follows the individual student |
| Feedback speed | Delayed, sometimes days | Immediate, in the moment |
| Questions asked | Limited by social pressure | Open, without judgment |
| Subject focus | Broad, covers whole class needs | Targeted to specific gaps |
| Confidence building | Dependent on class dynamic | Deliberate, session by session |
Math Is Where This Gets Brutal
All subjects have holes, but math is fundamentally different from other subjects in that it is sequential in nature.
As a result, by the time that a student realizes that he or she does not understand a particular concept, that concept will have already become part of a larger body of knowledge.
As a result, the student will not even realize that he or she had built a tower of sand two years before. The consequences of that fact can be catastrophic.
As for math, a student who has never quite grasped how to solve with fractions will get lost in algebra, for example.
Because they have built two years of schooling on the foundation of failing to master fractions, they will believe they are not a math kid.
This is at the root of the “math kids” vs “not math kids” conversation. But that is a whole other post. For families in this situation, finding a good math tutor is key.
Many students and their families are struggling to have their Math students keep up with their peers. For these families finding a good math tutor can make a big difference for their student.
A good math tutor can have their student back on track in a matter of a semester rather than 2 years and having their student falsely believe that they are not a “math kids.”
One-on-one tutoring can find the cracks in a student’s learning and help fill them before they become major problems.
In a math curriculum, concepts build upon each other in a linear fashion, so even a small gap in foundational learning can have significant consequences down the line.
With one-on-one tutoring, the tutor can find the fracture point in a student’s learning and help him or her get back on track before it becomes a problem that can’t be solved in a few short sessions.
So, Which Is Better?
Neither. Wrong question. Group classes are where students learn to learn with other students. In these classes students absorb information in a social environment.
Students learn to calibrate themselves to the learning pace of other students.
However, many students need additional support in learning within a group class setting.
That is where a tutor comes in. A tutor fills in the learning gaps that a group class setting is unable to fill.
- The concept that never fully landed despite three separate explanations in class
- The test anxiety nobody noticed because the student had learned to seem fine
- The subject a student actually loves but hasn't had room to go deep on
- The specific, quiet gap that's been dragging down an otherwise capable student's grade for months
When referring to learning situations, it is wrong to try to compare between learning in a group classroom setting and having individual tutoring.
These are two completely different programs and each has its own value and results.
Group classes in a classroom setting teach students how to be learners in a social setting with many other students, a vast array of information, and learning under the tutelage of one teacher.
Tutoring, on the other hand, provides a specially crafted curriculum designed to meet the student's individual needs.
While learning in a classroom setting, the student absorbs information within the framework of the curriculum and the teacher's instruction.
In tutoring sessions, the tutor helps the student to get to the root of what he or she is learning and can fill in any gaps in what the student’s other teachers are teaching.
And that’s how I know we need more tutors, a different classroom structure, or both! This is not to say that my seventh-grade teacher was failing at her job.
Clearly, she was able to teach the bulk of her students to be very competent readers of complex fiction, and that is not an easy thing to do. And I think she did the best she could with what she had.
But what she had was a structure that wasn’t really able to support all of her students in reaching their full potential, and that’s not a failing on her part. That’s a failing on our part as a culture and as a society.
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