Why does building relationships with students matter?
We learn best from people who care about us. Students who feel a connection with their tutor are more likely to engage in learning, ask questions, build motivation, and achieve better academic outcomes. Strong tutor-student relationships built on a foundation of shared understanding and trust create the conditions for all students to take the risks necessary to make dramatic academic gains.
What do strong, professional tutor-student relationships look like?
Strong relationships are built on five pillars: respect, trust, confidence, motivation, and self-awareness.
Respect. Tutors are the adults in the relationship. To earn students’ respect, tutors must deliver consistent and fair directions while also demonstrating they appreciate students’ time and efforts
Trust. To earn students’ trust, tutors must hold themselves accountable for the commitments they make to students. They must serve as a model of consistency, kindness, and respect despite how students may respond to them.
Confidence. To build students’ confidence, tutors must push them to take risks, learn from mistakes, grow as thinkers and as people, and ultimately achieve results they never knew they could. For students to realize their goals, tutors must believe students can succeed and communicate their high expectations of them.
Motivation. To motivate students academically, tutors must connect with their students as individuals and clearly demonstrate the connections between the material covered in the sessions and things that matter to the students as people.
Self-Awareness. To help students cultivate self-awareness, tutors themselves must be both aware of and honest about students’ strengths and weaknesses. They must help students practice holding themselves accountable to ambitious goals.
Examples of Strong vs. Weak Student Relationships
It is sometimes more helpful to know what to avoid than what to aim for, or easier to spot what isn’t working than what is. This tool provides examples of how to buildstrong tutor-student relationships, but it also highlights practices that lead to weak relationships across the five pillars.
| Pillar | Strong | Weak |
|---|---|---|
| Respect |
Tutors evenhandedly enforce, and students consistently engage and follow through with, all session rules and expectations. |
Tutors never (or, worse, selectively) enforce culture norms and expectations. Students rarely (if ever) engage with norms or expectations. |
| Trust |
Tutors choose their words with care and follow through on all commitments they make. |
Tutors say one thing but do another (e.g. “I’ll come back to that later on,” but they never do). |
| Confidence |
Tutors express confidence in students’ ability and demonstrate that confidence through action. |
Regardless of whether tutors say they believe in students’ ability, their actions suggest otherwise. |
| Motivation |
Tutors relentlessly work to motivate students by making sessions seem relevant to their interests. Tutors connect classwork, homework, and assessments to students’ individual goals: short-term, end-of-year, and long-term. |
Tutors undermine student engagement by failing to connect tutoring sessions to student interests. Tutors undermine student motivation by failing to connect tutoring sessions to student goals. |
| Self-Awareness |
Tutors are honest with students about their individual strengths and weaknesses. Tutors routinely share and celebrate student progress in hopeful, action-oriented ways. |
Tutors are unaware of or dishonest about students’ individual strengths and weaknesses. Tutors either do not share student progress at all, or do so in unproductive, even dismissive ways. |
Evaluating Student-Tutor Relationships:
This list of the student beliefs that reflect specific qualities of strong tutor-student relationships can be used to create student surveys (i.e. Yes/No or along a Strongly Agree/Disagree spectrum) to capture and quantify students’ experiences.
Respect
- “How much do you respect your tutor?”
- Not at all/A little bit/Somewhat/Quite a bit/A tremendous amount
- “How respectful is your tutor towards you?”
- Not at all/A little bit/Somewhat/Quite/Extremely
Trust
- “How supportive is your tutor?.”
- Not at all/A little bit/Somewhat/Quite/Extremely
- “How often do you feel judged by your tutor?”
- Never/Once in a while/Sometimes/Frequently/Almost all the time (Reverse scored)
- “How much do you trust your tutor?”
- Not at all/A little bit/Somewhat/Quite a bit/A tremendous amount
- “How often does your tutor follow through on what they say they will do?”
- Never/Once in a while/Sometimes/Frequently/Almost all the time
Confidence
- “When you feel like giving up on a difficult task, how likely is it your tutor will make you keep trying?”
- Not at all/A little bit/Somewhat/Quite/Extremely
- “Overall, how high are your tutor’s expectations of you?”
- Not high at all/Slightly high/Somewhat high/Quite high/Extremely high
Motivation
- “How much does your tutor motivate you?”
- Not at all/A little bit/Somewhat/Quite a bit/A tremendous amount
- “How often does your tutor make real-world connections to what you are learning?”
- Almost never/Once in a while/Sometimes/Often/Almost all the time
Self-Awareness
- “To what extent does your tutor help you recognize your strengths?”
- Not at all/A little bit/Somewhat/Quite a bit/A tremendous amount
- “To what extent does your tutor help you overcome your struggles?”
- Not at all/A little bit/Somewhat/Quite a bit/A tremendous amount