While hiring a tutor an important question arises in parents’ minds is whether they should hire a personal tutor or send their children for group tuition. There is no quick answer for this question. The choice depends on students' needs, their learning capability and budget of parents. Both of the modes of tuition come with some advantages and disadvantages.
Personal home tuition helps to deliver more focused, personalised, and subject specific teaching. Tutors customise the way of teaching as per student's specific needs and allocated time. Students also feel comfortable asking questions in home tuitions which they couldn't ask in classroom because of their shy nature or limited time in class.
This style of tutoring saves commute time of students which can be added to resting time or other activities of students. Another advantage of home tuition is that parents can keep their eyes on their children's performance and activities. Tutoring hours and study plans can be reviewed easily if your child is taking home tuition.
But there are certain disadvantages too. Since the nature of home tuition is one-on-one, it’s more expensive. Most of the time if tutor is commuting more than a certain limit of distance, parents have to pay for this commute in addition to high tuition charges. Because students get personal attention, students become more tutor dependent and tend to get help for all school assignments. Sometimes home tutoring proves less fruitful because of distraction. In home tuition, risk of developing unhealthy personal relationship between the growing child and tutor of the opposite sex in higher and this risk can’t be neglected.
Group tuition on the other hand is more affordable. Tutors have set of study plan, study material and assignments. Most of the times, tutors teaching group tuitions are full time tutors and they are more skilled than personal tutors. Group of students grows friendly small competition among students. The environment in group teaching is more suitable for learning. Generally, tuitions are conducted with proper set up. All these create better environment to learn.
The group environment encourages children to interact and collaborate, thereby imparting social skills. There are a certain disadvantages of group tuitions too. If the group is too large, effectively it’s no better than school class learning. Students with different pace of learning may have a problem. Parents can’t easily monitor their child’s performance and tutors’ teaching. Due to schedules classes, teachings have to stopped in middle if another class in scheduled. Commute to group tuition center eats student’s precious time.
In summary, choosing the right type of tuition is important. Group tuition is more suited for students who are at least average to good in their results, parents’ budget is limited and if tuition centers are not too far. A private one-to-one tuition is more suited for weaker students. The later makes it easy on parents’ pockets and to monitor their children and tutor.
(The writer is Vivek Singh, founder of BharatTutors.com)