Freedom of Choice

I like to give my students a lot of freedom when I'm tutoring. Rather than imposing set lesson plans on them, I generally let them decide how they would like to spend their session.

Normally this does not have much of an effect on what we do because the student will usually have a homework assignment to work on that takes up most of our time. But if the student has more than one assignment, I will ask him or her which we should work on first. This gives them the option to start out with an easy one to warm up or to tackle the difficult one first. You might think they always choose the former option, but really it's about 50/50. If the student has no school assignment to work on, I'll usually have two or more activities planned. These are usually reading a passage and answering questions, or doing the next section in the student's English grammar book or textbook, or working ahead in class. Again, the student is allowed to choose.

I'd like to believe that, in theory, my students will get more use out of our sessions together if they're given more freedom when choosing our activities. My goal is to get them to see our time together as not just another school-thing they have to do (even though it is) but a chance for them to improve their English.