Habit Makes the Good Student: Why High-Intensity Tutoring Works

In recent years, data has indicated that intensive tutoring works. The pivot to remote learning in 2020 offered a gold mine of data that we had never experienced before in relation to how helpful remote interaction can be for learners.

We learned about what worked and what didn’t. We know that students who have high-quality interaction with professional tutors, whether remote or in person, benefit from that interaction and progress faster academically.

We also learned that interaction needs to take place on a regular basis – in other words, it needs to be intensive. Yet so few students are actually getting that kind of help…only about 1% of students are getting intensive, quality tutoring with a professional tutor.

So the next question seems obvious to Skooli, and probably to you too: How do we get more students into the tutoring sessions that work?

Just start. Sounds too simple? Listen, we know what works, and Skooli provides it. Start tutoring in a program proven to get results, and then make it a habit. Okay, so it is more than just a start. Students must also keep starting sessions. But starting is the first step to making a habit.

Good tutoring revolves around good participation; a student who is acclimated to the routine of meeting with someone to guide them. They know when to meet and why. This is “old hat,” so to speak. Students log in and get to work right away with all the comfort of one who has been doing just that for months.

This atmosphere is more conducive to academic progress, but that level of comfort can only be reached after a student has had time to practice learning with a tutor. Habit is built from repetition, and this rule is no different when it comes to learning how to make the most out of high-intensity tutoring.

In order to understand the importance of making high-intensity tutoring a habit, it makes sense to understand what frequent tutoring sessions of this nature can do for students.

Of course, we often think of tutoring in terms of short-term goals, such as completing homework on time, making a good grade on a particular essay, or passing an upcoming exam.

But tutoring done with regularity, with habit, fulfills a higher educational purpose. It teaches structure and time management. It imparts valuable study skills, like how to read long assignments, look for patterns when answering questions, and all the little tricks that aid in memorization.

Students begin to pick up for themselves the skills of determining what needs to be memorized and what needs to be practiced; they begin to get an intuitive sense of where to start on school projects because they have done the same work with their tutors in many sessions before.

Making tutoring work is best done by making tutoring a habit. Skooli tutors have a treasure chest of skills and effective learning approaches to impart to students. They don’t just learn the equation for that chapter, or the main character for that reading selection. They have an opportunity to pick up on the methods that the tutors use for each lesson.

The more the students are exposed to these effective learning methods, the more likely they are to implement them in future academic settings. This is how habit makes the better students.