How To Become a Tutor and Earn Extra Money:

If you are wondering how to become a tutor, keep reading and I will do my best to give you the information you need.

Tutoring is one of the fastest growing home-based businesses that you can find. There are many options available to you, including working as a private tutor, tutoring online for an online tutoring agency, tutoring locally for a tutoring center, or tutoring students who are taking classes by distance learning or correspondence.

Setting up a tutoring business, in which you have a group of tutors working for you, is also an option you should consider. Many skilled and experienced people are looking for online tutoring jobs or local tutoring positions. If you are interested in running your own little-or big- business, this may be the choice for you.

First you will need to decide...do you want to tutor online? If you do, the whole world is your marketplace. Do you want to tutor in person only? This is very satisfying and rewarding, and there is great demand for local tutors who can meet in person with their students for tutoring instruction.

Next, you will need to decide...how will you do your marketing for your tutoring business? You can put up signs locally where accepted. You can advertise online, you can ask your friends to spread the word. For the 25 years I have been tutoring, I have used only word of mouth advertising and I have more students than I can possibly take on for tutoring.

How much will you charge? What hours will you work? How much tutoring will you do in a week? Where will you do the tutoring? Are you knowledgeable about tutoring regulations in your country?

Once you have answered all these questions, it is time to proceed with your plan. Get some students, and start sharing your skills. You will be helping someone else and making good money at the same time.

This blog contains much useful information for your tutoring business. Good luck! And please leave comments if you desire.




How to Become a Tutor: Building Confidence

How to Become a Tutor: Building Confidence
You may have heard it said that "Confidence is the memory of past successes." If you think about this, it really makes sense. We are confident in doing something that we have done several or even many times before.

What happens, though, when you have tried something several times and you always fail? How does that make you feel? We as tutors may not have memories of failing academically, but we can look at other areas of our lives to answer this question. Maybe you tried to play tennis but just couldn't polish the skills. This little exercise will help us to understand the feelings our students are experiencing.

Can you imagine struggling at math and never seeming to get the knack of it? That must be very frustrating! Or putting all your efforts into a literature assignment only to have it handed back all marked up in red and with a poor grade.

Sometimes as tutors we may feel impatient when our student just can't get what we are trying to teach. That's when we need to sit back and take a deep breath (figuratively speaking) and try a different approach.

So back to the original question, if confidence is the memory of past success, how do we help our student feel confidence in something they don't think they've ever experienced success in?

You must create it for them.

That's right, you must create a situation that they can be successful in, and let them experience the elation of having succeeded.

It starts small. Don't try for a big success before the student has a established a pattern of small successes.

After the first couple of tutoring sessions, when the student is starting to feel a little more comfortable around you, encourage him to repeat some of the positive affirmations you are saying. When he has solved a problem correctly, even if you helped him, get him to say out loud that he did a good job. It's one thing for the student to always hearing you say it, and quite another for him to say it out loud himself.

The main key here is that you are trying to instill in him some belief that he can do this (whatever the subject is.) The belief will be a strong factor in creating success, which in turn will boost confidence.

The following book is recommended reading if you are really interested in helping your students build their confidence. It is a fairly quick read, and gets quite to the point. It is not full of a lot of fluff or re-hashed concepts.






The process of helping another person build confidence can sometimes be a rocky road. People are different, and you will have to individualize your strategies.

Encourage your student to talk to you. Encourage him to express his feelings about how he is doing. Even if it starts out sounding negative, it gets him used to talking to you and confiding in you. This gives you a basis to work on.

Have him take one of the negative things he says and turn it into a positive. If he acts a little shy about doing this, you do it for him to show him how its done. Then have him repeat it after you.

For example, he may say "I can't do long division. I always mess up."
You could get him to say, "In the past I couldn't do long division. Today I can. I am learning how and I will get at least one done correctly today."

Then help him work through a long division successfully. Keep encouraging along the way. He doesn't have to do it all by himself yet. That will come. Reinforce the successes all along the way.

How to Become A Tutor: Tutoring to Supplement Your Income

How to Become a Tutor: Tutoring to Supplement Your Income
While tutoring is a great way to supplement your income, the income should not be your focus. Tutoring is not like a day job you dislike that you just "show up for every day." While it is important to you to make money tutoring, trust me that you need to care more about your students than about the money to really shine at this job. The money will definitely come, but make sure your focus is in the right place.

When you tutor, you are going to be on a very personal, individual level with another person. You become that person's mentor, and a level of trust is built up. Your student will be able to tell how much you genuinely care. If you are only in this job for the income, this will be very clear to the student, and you will not be successful.

I have found in my 25+ years of tutoring that the student's success is built as much upon confidence as it is upon skill set.

Fostering confidence in your student is going to be one of your main objectives. How will you do this? If you were given the assignment to build your student's confidence in a way that is not based on teaching them more skills in the subject being tutored, how would you do it?

Get a pencil and paper and start brainstorming. I am not going to give out any ideas until the next post. :)