I recently started tutoring here on LingQ, and I wanted to pose a question to other tutors/teachers: How do you create a positive, safe, and welcoming learning environment for students?
To be quite honest, I don’t have a lot of experience learning in a positive environment as a student. In school, I unfortunately had a bad/pretty stressful experience, especially later on in high school (specifically related to learning and academics). For a long time, I’ve been interested in the processes and methods of learning and teaching. I know that learning can be more fun/enriching, but I worry that I don’t have the ability to create that type of space as a teacher, because I don’t have a lot to draw on from my past experiences.
In addition to posing this question to tutors/teachers, I would love to hear from anyone regarding:
your positive/negative experiences related to learning
your mindset or philosophy related to teaching
your general experience here on LingQ (or elsewhere) as a language learner
I have been teaching online for ver 20 years. My advice is to remain very positive and smile a lot. Encourage them while gently making suggestions or corrections. Always end by mentioning their strengths and making suggestions to help them strengthen their weaknesses and then finishing with a compliment. Like a sandwich - positive - corrections/suggestions - positive. Enjoy! Teaching is so fun and rewarding. As far as patience - I just imagine myself on the other side (learning their language) and then I understand the potentional frustration. Be sensitive enough to see when they are reaching a level of frustration and then help them out a bit. I also have a very all inclusive environment so that anyone can feel comfortable being themselves and not worry about being judged in my classroom.
I’m not a tutor, but when I hire a tutor, if they correct me too much, I stop hiring their services. Many tutors seem to think they are helping when they correct you, but if they insist on correcting every mistake I do, then we never get anywhere in the lesson. I generally have to tell tutors to stop correcting me so much and give them some limit, like a max of 10 corrections per session or something. After you tell the tutor to reduce the number of “constructive feedback,” then they are usually respectful about it.