Getting a tutor to help your child’s academic pursuit has becoming an increasingly common trend. At the same time, it is vital for parents to build up a partnership with teacher/tutor to ensure that your child is getting their most out of tutoring/school.
As a result, it is important to contact regularly with your tutor/teacher to check upon your child’s performance.
Below, we have suggested the 12 best questions to ask teachers/tutors in order to ensure that your child is getting most out of tutoring/school:
1. How is my child doing academically, socially and emotionally?
It is equally important to address your child’s peer relation and emotion health as their academic pursuit.
Academically: how is your child doing regarding their school work/tutoring work. Is the grade your child receiving consistent with what he/she is capable of? It is important to know that the focus should be ensuring your child is maximising their full potential in their learning.
Socially: This relates to your child’s learning of the value, knowledge and skill which enable them to relate to others. Ultimately, building their skill to effectively and positively contribute to their family and peers. This is the part where parents should have the most influence over their child.
Emotionally: Many parents could find that their child is reluctant opening up to them. This is when you should ask the teacher/tutor if your child is experiencing any serious problems at school. For example, bullying, no friends etc. This will relate to your child’s learning of what feelings and emotions are, understanding how and why they happen, recognising one’s own feelings and those of others, and learning to manage them. This is a complex task that begins during infancy and continues into adulthood.
It is more important for parents to always support their children emotionally and socially.
2. Should I Tell You About My Child?
No one knows about your child as much as you do. As a result, it is a great idea for parents to tell the teacher a bit about your child.
This gives deeper insights to teachers/tutors regarding your child outside of academic.
Ultimately, this will enable your child’s teacher/tutor to learn more about your child in multitudinous aspects . As a result, it will help them to adapt suitable teaching method for your child.
3. Which Activities Most Engage My Child In Her Learning?
Finding out what motivates your child. What are some of the things tutor/teacher carry out which your child finds exciting or rewarding. This will give you some indication if the teacher/tutor are really engaging or teaching your child to the best potential.
This will also give you more insight about your child outside home and will come handy when you try to encourage and motivate your child.
4. What Area/Subject Is My Child Struggling With?
The most common question asked by parents to the tutor/teacher. Finding out your child’s weakness will enable you to find solutions in helping your child in their academic as well as social life.
However, it is important to discover what exactly is your child struggling with.
School work: This is what your child are supposed to be doing like every other children in the year. This is set by the Department of Education and is expected that your child would able to have a grasp on by the time they finish the year. As a result, this is the only aspect where parents should really be taking strategies to help if their child is struggling.
Tutor work: This could be extra work you want your child to be doing or extra help for school. Parents shouldn’t be too concerned at this stage because the work given to the child could be beyond the capability of most children in your child’s grade.
If your child is struggling a lot only in the extra/harder work from tutoring, you should consider whether you want/or not to continue the tutoring. If the pressure is too high from outside school work, your child’s performance at school work could downgrade too. This would be last thing every parents want.
5. What Are You Going To Do To Help?
Ask for the teachers/ tutor’s strategy in helping your child. Think about if you agree or approve of their teaching method/assistance to your child.
Do you think this will work on your child based on their study habit and personality?
This allows you to consider implementing similar strategies at home to help your child.
6. Is My Child Coping Well With His/Her Work?
Your child’s teacher sees him from a very different perspective than you do at home.
Find out how your child is doing in every aspects. Are they up to the pace of the teaching in class? Are they performing at a reasonable level for assessments? Are they doing/completing their classwork/homework in time?
Ask the teacher what personal weaknesses your child needs to work on, and listen to the response with an open mind.
7. Is My Child Doing Their Best?
No matter where your child ranks in the grade or the mark he is achieving, one important analysis of his performance is whether he’s trying his best.
Find out what may be stopping your child performing to their best and discuss with the teacher/tutor on how to motivate your child.
Don’t compare your child to other students in the class. Every child has different capability and potential. It is important to foster confidence and belief in your child in order to encourage to try at their hardest.
8. What Is Your Teaching Method?
Different teachers have different teaching methods. Depending on your child’s personality and study habit, some may work and some may not.
As a result this will enable you to  finding out if their teaching method will endure your child getting the most out of school/tutoring.
9. Do You See Any Improvements In My Child?
Find out if your child is receiving any benefit from tutoring. You can evaluate their statement by making similar observation at home.
If your child is improving, make sure you give them rewards at home to keep them motivated and improve even more in the future.
10. What Do You Think My Child Is Good At?
Find out some good things too, to encourage and create some positivity for your child too. This can be anything beyond school. By finding out what your child is good at, this could help you determine what type of learner they are.
Furthermore, this can help you find out the type of dream career/pursuit your child may have at an early stage.
11. What Can I Do To help?
After all, it is mostly parent’s responsibility to keep track of their child’s well being and academic conduct.
This enables you to cooperate with the teacher/tutor to create a plan with your child to work harder in that area.
You can help by simply offering assistance to your child’s homework.
12. Do you have any recommendations?
If you need help with an issue your child is having, ask the teacher/tutor for help. Teachers and tutors have been exposed to hundreds of students, and would definitely be more professional and specialized in such areas.
So here are the 12 best questions to ask teachers and tutors! Remember to always have faith in your child and put yourself into their shoes.
Yifan Shen completed his HSC in 2014 and is currently studying a Bachelor Of Economics/Advanced Mathematics at UNSW. Apart from nutting out equations and helping out students with their academic pursuit, you will find him either reading thriller novels or introducing a range of new people to the intricate and mysterious world of mathematics as the marketing representative of UNSW MathSoc. When he is drained from all of this work, you will also see him hiking, planking and water bending in his recovery mode.
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