Tutoring vs. Mentoring

When it comes to taking steps to improve grades or have additional study for greater comprehension there are a number of options available to students. While tutoring, especially one-on-one if you can afford it, is the best option for those who find traditional teaching methods easy to understand, there are many students who would do better with a mentoring situation.

Mentoring can mean a number of things including having a more experienced student or a professional in your future field offering advice about practical aspects of the course. It can also mean finding a person or organization that can model what is required. For many students this is a much easier way for them to absorb what is required because a visual stimulus is more effective for their brain wiring or learning style. In fact many students who seek extra help fall into this category specifically because if they were able to retain information taught in traditional tutoring or classroom styles, they wouldn’t be in a position of needing extra help in the first place.

For some students the ability to absorb and retain information comes from seeing the data in writing and from copying a practice, procedure or the format for a set of facts (or writing styles) from someone else – a mentor. For example this type of student can be told by a tutor that a sonnet is a lyric poem, typically with a strict rhyme scheme and fourteen lines. That information will likely translate to blah, blah, blah – it’s meaningless for some students. But, this same student given an example of a fully constructed sonnet and then taken through the step by step process of creating a sonnet will absorb the information and be capable of producing a completed work as required. It is possible even, that they will be able to do this without being able to verbalize what they have done, that’s because these students are visual thinkers, not oral, and what works for them is different.