Questions to ask a tutor before you start

By the time a family reaches a consultation, they have usually rehearsed their own account — the report card, the homework battles, what the teacher said. What tends to get left out is the reverse direction. The questions below are ones that tend to distinguish providers, along with a note on what a substantive answer sounds like.

You will not ask all twelve. Four or five, chosen for what actually concerns you, is plenty.

About the instruction

1. How will you work out what my child specifically needs?

A substantive answer describes a process — listening to the child read, working backwards through prerequisite skills, looking at recent work. A weak answer is a program name, or an assurance that they will get to know her. The distinction matters because instruction aimed at the wrong layer is a common way tutoring wastes a term.

2. What happens in a typical session?

You are listening for structure and for adaptability at the same time. An answer with no shape suggests sessions may be improvised around whatever homework arrives; an answer that is entirely fixed suggests the sequence will run regardless of what your child needs.

3. How much of the session is direct instruction?

Particularly worth asking wherever a tutor works with more than one student at a time. A ninety-minute session at a four-to-one ratio is not ninety minutes of teaching, and the arithmetic is worth doing before comparing prices.

4. Will my child work with the same person each week?

How much this matters depends on the child. For a student who is anxious or has stopped volunteering answers, continuity of relationship is often doing a substantial part of the work.

5. What do you do if what you try is not working?

This is possibly the most revealing question on the list. Every honest tutor has had a student who did not respond to the first approach. An answer that acknowledges this and describes changing course is more reassuring than one implying it does not happen.

About the person

6. What is your background with this age group?

Elementary teaching is a specific skill and not a scaled-down version of secondary teaching. Early reading in particular has a body of practice behind it that someone can be highly educated without knowing. It is reasonable to ask what training or classroom experience sits behind the instruction.

7. Have you taught this specific difficulty before?

Not a disqualifier if the answer is no, but the answer to a difficulty someone has seen repeatedly usually sounds different — more specific, more willing to name what commonly causes it — from an answer to one they have not.

About working together

8. What will I hear, and how often?

Communication practices vary widely and the difference is significant. You are looking for something specific enough to act on: what was worked on, what happened, what to do at home. "We will let you know how it is going" is not that.

9. What should I be doing at home — and what should I stop doing?

The second half is the useful part. Well-intentioned home practice can work directly against instruction, particularly with reading, where prompting a struggling child to guess from the picture undermines exactly what decoding work is building. A tutor who has a view on this has thought about the whole system rather than only the session.

10. How will we know whether this is working?

Grades lag by a term and are affected by things tutoring does not touch. A better answer names something closer to the instruction — the specific skill being rebuilt, and what movement in it would look like. It is also fair to ask when you would expect to have some sense either way.

About the practical arrangements

11. How does scheduling work, and what happens when we miss?

Ask about the actual policy rather than assuming, since practices differ. Illness and school events are inevitable across a school year, and it is better to know how they are handled before the first one.

12. What happens if you do not think tutoring is the right answer?

Worth asking precisely because of what a poor answer reveals. Not every difficulty is a tutoring problem. Some point toward a school conversation, an evaluation, or a conversation with an appropriate qualified professional. A provider who cannot imagine a case where they are not the answer is describing a sales position rather than a professional judgement.

Answers worth paying attention to

None of these is disqualifying on its own. As a pattern they are informative.

• A guarantee of specific results, or a promise of a particular grade-level gain by a particular date
• A recommendation made before anyone has looked at what your child can actually do
• Discomfort with the question about what happens when an approach is not working
• No description of how you will hear about progress
• An answer to every difficulty that is the same answer
• Pressure to commit during the first conversation

Related: what to look for in an elementary tutor covers the criteria behind these questions, and when to hire a tutor covers the decision that precedes them.