Tellucate Tutors is different to the sector as a whole in that we are laser-focused on using teaching methods that are backed by evidence and research. We are nerdy about this, and like to share! If you are interested to learn more, see our foundational principles below. We do not take credit for creating them - many of the best ideas in education are very long-standing - but education is prone to fads which often steer teaching away from its most effective fundamentals. There is more to our method than this, but many of the fundamentals are laid out here.

1.     Share the goal. Students need a clear target to aim at. Zoomed out, this could be “Get an A in my English Language exam”. Zoomed all the way in to an individual lesson, this could be “Be confident with embedding quotes by the end of the hour”.  Without a clearly defined goal, teaching often becomes random worksheets and activities that circle vaguely around the subject. Progress becomes difficult to track. With a goal, mini-wins become regular, building up motivation and your relationship with the student. Ultimately, the student learns much faster.

Reading: How helpful are learning objectives? | InnerDrive

2.     Engineer success. This is not a buzz-phrase way to say ‘teach well’, although we concede it sounds like it! Engineering success means setting the difficulty of tasks for students in such a way that they will experience a roughly 80-85% success rate. Much more successful than that and learning isn’t happening at any significant scale (and the student is likely to be bored). But the ideal success rate is not 50/50 either; it’s tilted strongly towards succeeding. This is because learning is fundamentally a vulnerable act, sending us into the unknown where we cannot be smooth and confident straight away. Students will start to disengage if mistakes become too numerous and overwhelming. We protect them from that with our task design, like guarding a flame. 15-20%% is “Goldilocks’s Error Rate”. We keep our students there, or thereabouts.

Reading: From The Kindling To The Fire: On obtaining high success rates – peace to the cottages war on the palaces (wordpress.com)

3.     Go slowly. All teachers have “the curse of knowledge”. We know a lot about our subjects. It is almost impossible to recall the hard slog of gaining that knowledge once we’re out the other side. Lots seems basic that was once hugely complex for us. The natural tendency is to go too fast, and pitch the difficulty too high. This is really unpleasant and unhelpful for students. Think of the dad teaching his child to drive, at a loss as to why they can’t grasp something so obvious, shouting in frustration – his own struggles and mistakes long faded from the memory. We go slowly, because going slowly makes learning real and secure. We’re never impatient.

Reading: The Curse of Knowledge: A cognitive bias all teachers should be aware of - Evidence Based Education

4.     Check, check, check. Once we teach something, we check the student has understood. Sounds simple, but you’d be surprised how often this is missed! It’s also often done badly. Checking means the student proves independently that they can do it. “Does that make sense?” is not a check, because students have poor incentives to say ‘yes’ – they want to please us and they don’t want to sound like they don’t know. When we check, we resist ‘rounding up’. Rounding up is the natural tendency to reward a mostly correct answer by making a tiny correction ourselves or adding a little polish. Right is right. We feedback and have the student try again. There’s nothing like that big smile from a student when they really smash the answer, without us doing any of the work on their behalf.

Reading: Reading (teacherhead.com)

5.     Fight the forgetting curve. Perhaps the most confirmed piece of research in education is that humans forget almost everything. A teacher can explain something brilliantly, and - with certainty – discover within the space of two weeks the student has forgotten it, or it’s shaky. Nothing has gone wrong here. This is what expect to happen. Learned information falls away sharply in the memory without intervention. The good news is we know what to do about it – retrieval practice. Each time a student has to recall something from memory, its ‘storage strength’ gets stronger. The memory takes longer to degrade and less of it leaves, especially if they were near to forgetting when they practice retrieving it. After multiple repetitions of this over time, the learning will become bombproof, in the way we all remember Henry VIII and “Divorced, Beheaded, Died” .

Reading: What is retrieval practice? – Retrieval Practice

6.    Believe your students can do it. This is a moral duty anyway, but we also have powerful evidence of the effect of teacher expectations on student outcomes. This called the Pygmalion Effect (High expectations leading to seriously improved results) and the Golem Effect (The opposite). We make this belief as plain as day to the student, because we know from long experience that they, as with so many others, can be brilliant.

Reading: The Pygmalion Effect: What does the latest research say? | InnerDrive