| The best way to leam is to teach. This is the message emerging from experiments in several | ||
| schools in which teenage pupils who have problems at school themselves are tutoring younger | ||
| children - with remarkable results for both sides . According to American research, pupil tutoring | ||
| wins 'hands down' over computerized instruction and American teachers say that no other recent | ||
| 5 | innovation has proved so consistently successful. | |
| Now the idea is spreading in Britain. Throughout this term, a group of 14-year-olds at Trinity | ||
| Comprehensive in Leamington Spa have been spending an hour a week helping children at a | ||
| nearby primary school with their reading. The younger children read aloud to their tutors (who | ||
| are supervised by university students of education) and then play word games with them. All the | ||
| 10 | 14-year-olds have some of their own lessons in a special unit for children who have difficulties at | |
| school. Though their intelligence is around average, most of them have fallen behind on reading, | ||
| writing and maths and, in some cases, this has led to truancy* or bad behaviour in class. | ||
| Jean Bond, who is running the special unit, says that the main benefit of tutoring is that it | ||
| improves the adolescents' self-esteem. 'The younger children come rushing up every time and | ||
| 15 | welcome them. It makes the tutors feel important whereas, in normal school lessons, they often | |
| feel inadequate. Everyone benefits. The older children need practice in reading but, if they had to | ||
| do it in their own classes , they would say it was kid's stuff and be worried about losing face. The | ||
| younger children get individual attention from very patient people: the tutors are struggling at | ||
| school themselves, so, when the younger ones can't leam , they know exactly why.' | ||
| 20 | Jean Bond, who describes pupil tutoring as an 'educational conjuring trick ', has run two | |
| previous experiments. In one, six persistent truants, aged 15 upwards, tutored 12 slow-leaming | ||
| infants in reading and maths. None of the six played truant from any of the tutoring sessions . | ||
| 'The degree of concentration they showed while working with their tutees was remarkable for | ||
| pupils who had previously shown little ability to concentrate on anything related to school work | ||
| 25 | for any period of time,' writes Bond in the current issue of Educational Review. 'Their own | |
| reading, previously mechanical and monotonous, became far more expressive as a result of | ||
| reading stories aloud to infants.' | ||
| The tutors also became more sympathetic to their own teachers' difficulties, because they were | ||
| frustrated themselves when the infants 'mucked about.' | ||
| 30 | Other experiments have also shown clear gains in children's leaming. Carol Fitz-Gibbon, a | |
| lecturer at Newcastle University, got low-achieving 14-year-olds in Los Angeles to teach fractions | ||
| to nine-year-olds. After the experiment, the tutors did much better on a test than contemporaries | ||
| who had been taught fractions in normal lessons. Even more remarkably, they maintained their | ||
| lead on another test three months later, while the other children seemed to have forgotten | ||
| 35 | everything they had leamt. Fitz-Gibbon reports that several tutors were anxious to get their sums | |
| right to save embarrassment in front of younger children: 'In low-achieving secondary maths | ||
| classes it is frequently quite difficult to induce any sense of needing to leam maths. References to | ||
| later employability or exam success mean little to restless teenagers. The tutoring project | ||
| provided tutors with an immediate need to know the work.' | ||
| 40 | Advocates of pupil tutoring stress that it is essential for the tutors to be more advanced in | |
| reading and maths than the younger pupils. This is why tutoring within the same age group, or | ||
| across a narrow age difference, does not work. | ||
| The Sunday Times, December 5, 1982 |