Choosing to hire “a” tutor may be a fairly pragmatic decision. Your child needs help—you get help. Choosing “the right” tutor is more complicated because it involves the blending of a business decision with a matter of the heart.

Learning is an adventure

No good parent is looking for a knuckle cracking, drill sergeant tutor who will snuff any vestige of the love for learning right out of their child. Yet, somewhere beneath the frustration of poor report cards, as a parent you realize that well-ordered learning instruction is exactly what your child needs. You’ve heard the old rhetoric that “Learning Can Be Fun” and you are now questioning what planet the person who coined that phrase lived on! For a struggling child, formal learning can be misery.

As an educator, I have found that while learning can be fun, sometimes it isn’t. Mostly it is a lot of work. A better paradigm in tutoring is to think of work as an adventure. Adventures have challenges; satisfaction comes in looking back at the end. Having a realistic approach to what tutoring is, and what it is not, is the first and ultimately most vital step in choosing a great tutor.

Find the right fit

The second step ought to be looking for a tutor with a compatible personality. You know your own child better than any professional educator. You know his ability, his character, and his dreams. Unlike a school where your child is assigned to a teacher, in a tutoring situation you get to control which teacher is assigned to your child. Make the most of this parental power!

The wonderful thing about TutorSource is that every tutor you find here has a profile where they make a personal statement and tell you their tutoring approach. I spent considerable time researching different tutoring companies before I signed up here and I chose this one because it is one of the best sites in the market for helping parents make informed choices. Read the tutor profiles carefully. Look for answers that step beyond the standard clichés to find a statement that clicks in your heart. You know your child deserves more than simple computer-matching by zip code.

Qualifications are important, but not everything

A third consideration for choosing the right tutor is the credentialing. It is important, but not all-important. The reason I say this should be fairly obvious; if a college degree and state certification were all it took to make your child a star student, you would not be looking for a tutor now. Every child could put in their thirteen years at school and graduate as a genius.

The significance of any credential is that it marks a baseline for proficiency. Beyond that, it says very little about whether a tutor will be a good match for your child. Tutoring is very different from classroom education. It’s personalized with immediate feedback, customized explanations, and individualized pacing. Choose a tutor who is competent in the subject area where your child needs help, and then has the ability to work outside the conventional classroom rubric.

One point that is easy to overlook when choosing a tutor is the learning style. Perhaps you are aware that your child learns best by seeing pictures, or by hearing explanations, or by doing hand-on projects. These are classified as visual, auditory, and kinetic learning styles respectively. Most people learn by all these means, but have one area that is predominant. Teachers have teaching styles too. A highly visual teaching style will have the greatest success matched with a visual learner. If you are aware of how your child learns best, it can be helpful to have a discussion about learning style during the emailing stage of tutor selection.

Consider the tutor’s experience

Tips on choosing the right tutor would not be complete without commenting on the value of experience. Just as every tutoring situation is unique, so is the importance of tutoring experience. Sometimes it is critical and can make all the difference in the world. Sometimes it is totally superfluous. I have seen a 10-year-old be more effective than a tenured professional at teaching her younger sibling how to read. It is not the norm, but it happens. In this case, the younger child admired and trusted her older sister far more than she admired or trusted Dr. Dryasdust, and it was the experience of the sisters’ relationship, not the academics that made the difference.

If you are seeking tutoring, the norm probably hasn’t been working for your child either. The importance of having experience, which often comes with higher tutoring fees, depends largely upon why your child needs tutoring. By hiring an experienced tutor, you will be improving the chances that you get someone who has dealt with your child’s struggles before. Children with processing disorders and certain learning disabilities are those for whom having an experienced tutor is more important. Children who need a tutor to catch up after an illness or who are seeking tutoring to help them excel in advanced placement may do equally well with a less experienced college student who can explain the material effectively. As a parent, you are the best qualified person to make this judgment call. Perhaps the best way to put it is that experience is very important, but rapport can trump experience.

Conclusion

In the final analysis, remember that you are choosing a mentor for your child. He or she may not have the hottest picture in the profile, or the lengthiest resume on the list, or the catchiest quip on the page, but they ought to be a person who loves their job and shares the values that you want your child to emulate.