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8 Things to Consider Before You Hire a Home Tutor

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Hire a Home Tutor is always an option when parents have the privilege to get one.

Most parents look for a private tutor because they think their child has either fallen behind in their subjects or because the current school system and tuition center aren’t helpful in achieving the student’s learning goal.

Picking a home tutor or an online private tutor can be tricky.

A good private tuition could bring a huge impact on a student’s life, often in developing a positive learning attitude or significant improvement in result. 

If a lesson isn’t conducted correctly, it could cause a feeling of rejection toward learning within the student themselves and deteriorate a student’s desires in their future studies.

Home Tuition

As you are reading this article, I believe you may have thought of looking for home tuition service.

Starting to have home tuition isn’t an easy decision. Parents are spending a relatively higher amount for exclusive lessons with an experienced tutor, with the hope their child would improve in their studies.

But is it worth it? How do you know if you would pick the right one? What tutor’s characteristic that I should be looking at?

If you have made up your mind to hire a private tutor, continue reading as I am going to exclusively share with you 8 tips that you MUST KNOW before invest.

These recommendations are made based on 1000+ happy parents who hire a home tutor with GoLearn.

The syllabus includes local Malaysia National and International Baccalaureate curriculum for students from elementary school through diploma level

“I’m thinking of hiring a home tutor or an online tutor. Are you sure?”

1. Look for An Alternative Options​​

Aside from hiring a home tutor, you might be surprised to explore the free options that are available out there, which could be helpful for your child.

These options include:

    • Getting help from school teachers
    • Learning from peers at school
    • Attending a learning seminar or workshop conducted by school or external party
    • Make use of school or city libraries 
    • Learn from pre-recorded video shared by teachers on platforms like Youtube and Facebook

Instead of private tuition, a paid small group tutoring, live online class or enroll in a tuition center are options offered by tutoring companies.

Besides knowing more peer, your child will learn something from there. If all these options doesn’t suit your children, you can consider to find a home tutor.

Type of tuition comparison

“I’ve decided to hire a private tutor. Here’s what you should know.”

2. Clearly Know Your Objective​​

Are you trying to help your child to score better in a test? Or do you just want your child to improve on a particular subject?

Believe me, most parents can’t tell the difference and think both of them can run concurrently.

They seem to be similar, but unfortunately when down to the lesson design and teaching method, they are totally different. This would mean the knowledge that your child learns is different.

This is why the first thing parents need to do is to identify your objective before you hire a home tutor. Then, you will have a clear picture of what you’re trying to achieve. The tutor selection process will be straightforward if you know your goal.

A short-term speed lesson to pass or score a good result in examination is a typical performance goal.

A medium-long term learning goal should be focusing on building strong basic understanding about a subject and your child will be able to utilize the knowledge in future.

In general, learning goals should be the priority as it will lead to a way better performance in the long run.

The good thing is that the learning process happens at your child’s own pace.

If your child needs enhancement class with excessive targeted preparation to pass a test or to get into a college, a performance goal should be selected.

Goal setting for education

But, be aware of the pitfalls and your child may pay a huge price in future.

Things get worse if the tutor adopts the memorizing strategy and to focus only on potential exam questions.

You child will have to take up extra hours of studies in future simply to close the gap in fundamental knowledge of a subject.

3. Check the Home Tutor's Credibility​​

When you are looking for a premium 1-to-1 home tuition or online private tutoring service, a tutor’s credibility is one of the main factors to consider.

In the market, there’s so many tutors to pick from, but it is hard to really know about the tutor’s true personality, their knowledge in the subject that they teach as well as their capability in conducting an effective lesson.

Hence, background screening is the primary step that every parent should do, but it is difficult to tell if a tutor’s suitable for your child based on the first impression and a simple social check.

Here’s the advice.

  • When you hire a private tutor, make sure you know that person personally and their teaching style.
  • If you found a tutor online, try to get comments from other parents who deal with them before or to check if he/she has recent involvement in conducting private lessons.
  • If you were assigned a tutor from an agency, make sure you check the background of the tutor.

You might want to look for tutor who is qualified for early childhood development for younger child. They have in-depth knowledge on what’s needed for the healthy development of preschool children a lot better compared to the general tutors.

If you kids require special needs, do make sure the tutor are trained to handle these children.

Home Tuition Penang

4. Compare the Tuition Rate​​

I believe every parent has their own budget and requirements when come to private tuition. However, “you get what you pay for” does not necessarily apply here.

Tuition fees for private tuition varies according to the tutor’s qualification and teaching experiences.

Special requirements from parents, city, distance to your house, increase in number of tutoring hours, add extra subjects and so on will incur additional cost.

The tuition rates you found online is a good guideline start with. You can check out our tuition rate as well.  Remember,

Price does not predict effectiveness.

5. Get the Ratings and Reviews​​ of A Tutor

Mention in previous criteria, rating and reviews are crucial factors while looking for a suitable tutor.

Although you wouldn’t be able to fully tell about a tutor, at least you’ll be able to get some idea about the teaching approaches and subjects that a tutor is good at.

When you book a tutor through GoLearn, you can look for the ratings and past comments on the tutor’s profile.

You can also contact us to get the detailed info about the tutor. When you get a tutor from another agency, you can request the resume of the tutor or a written review from the agency itself.

When you’ve all the information about the tutor, one last thing you should do is to ask for a trial class. This bring us to another tips to hire a home tutor.

Tutor's review

6. Ask for a Trial Class​​

This is a secret! Most tutors provide free or paid trial classes. Before you jump straight to tutoring services, requesting a trial class is a way to tell you most things about a tutor.

You can have all the homework done, but without a physical home tuition lesson or virtual online tuition, you can’t be fully confident that’s the right tutor you should hire.

The most effective way is to spare a couple of minutes to arrange a trial lesson with the tutor.

Then, join the live tutoring session with your child and conduct evaluation on the tutor’s personality, communication with your child and teaching style.

After the lesson, ask your child if he/she feels comfortable when learning with the tutor and able to catch up with the lesson.

Once you’re done, I assure you’ll have a clear picture if you would hire the tutor or not.

Do remember that it takes time and effort to prepare the lesson, commute to your house, pass tolls (if any) and conduct the trial tutoring session.

Hence for home tuition, I encourage parents to pay for the trial class. You may request a free trial for online tutoring since it requires less arrangement.

“I’ve hired a private tutor. Here’s what you should do.”

7. Monitor the Tutor’s Attitude and Action​​

It is easy to hire a home tutor, but the important part is to get a tutor who can teach your child with passion and empathy.

If you watch closely, you can identify a significant difference between tutor who are passionate about teaching and tutor who treat teaching as a part-time job. It is like magic and you can feel how they deliver a lesson and communicate with your child.

Active participation in the learning process is crucial for effective learning. You have to make sure your tutor proactively gets your child in discussion and expressing their thoughts, not just sitting quietly and listening to tutor talks.

Home Tutoring Happening at Home

Here’s Something You Should Be Looking For

If your child does something awesome,

Does the tutor complement them by saying “Well done!” and continue with the next topic?

Does the tutor ask follow-up questions to check your child’s thoughts?

A good tutor will always ensure your child really understands the question and is able to get the correct answer based on their understanding.

If your child makes a mistake,

Does the tutor tell him/her that it was a mistake and show them the correct answer?

Does the tutor try to understand why your child chose the answer?

Understanding why a choice is made gives tutor insight into your child’s thinking process and problem solving skills. From there, the tutor can correct the error from the root. A good tutor sees mistakes as an opportunity for improvement.

Usually, the tutor will not abruptly correct the mistake, but rather allows the student to make as many mistakes as possible.

Then through correct methods, he/she helps the students to identify their own mistakes and correct them. This skill is crucial even if the tutor is no longer there.

8. Set Average Expectation​​

A good tutor doesn’t mean your child will improve by a lot in the end. There are many factors at play that affect the outcome of tutoring.

Outside factors such as the classroom environment and living situations are also one of the factors.

However, with a right tutor and right teaching method, your child generally benefited in long term which reflected in their academic performance.

Every child has their own characteristics and learning pace.

Allocating too much tutoring sessions per week can actually backfire and impact negatively on your child.

An experienced tutor usually has their own way of teaching, but it isn’t necessarily effective on every child.

Overly high expectations, especially on meeting a performance goal could stress out both the tutor and your child too. I have to emphasize this:

Building a good relationship with your tutor so you can properly communicate your thoughts and get involved in the lesson design process.

You’ll be surprised to listen to something that you don’t even know about your child!

This is  the final thing you should consider before you hire a home tutor.

Home Tuition In a Nutshell​​

Congratulation! You have made it here! 

Remember, picking a right tutor is hard, but having him/her to effectively teach your child, either for performance or learning goals is even harder.

Deciding which tutor to go with can be tedious and stressful in the beginning, but I assure you that it’s worth the effort and time.

“Rome is not built in a day, same goes to learning.”

Plan out a long term study goal

and work towards your child’ success with your home tutor or online private tutor.

If you have made up your mind to hire a home tutor or an online private tutor, easiest way is to get one from GoLearn. We are professional agency that find best home tuition in Malaysia for parents for FREE. Contact us directly if you’ve any additional concern.  

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