Section 6: Miscellaneous School Topics

Chapter 35: Tutoring

When coming abroad and starting to work at a school, you may have the chance to get some private tutoring in. As a forewarning, in most countries on an English teaching visa, tutoring other students while on a contract is illegal and against your visa. It is highly recommended that you do not engage in other jobs while you are on contract as you can be deported if you make a mistake and are reported for it. However, if you are put into a situation where you are tutoring, you must realize that it is a lot different from teaching in a normal school or private academy. For each lesson you need to make sure that you are planning directly around the student and their needs. Always make sure to find out what they are studying and possibly get some pictures of their book so that you can base lessons around that. When it comes to tutoring you should always talk to your potential students who want to study with you and find out exactly what they need to learn. Since they are one on one sessions typically, we do not recommend studying for over an hour to two hours for each session as it can be difficult to sit down for long times without very concrete and well-made lesson plans. On the occasion you can do longer tutoring and it is just based around book work, it is not bad to do and to think of examples for vocabulary and grammar on the fly. As long as you are flexible and able to change up the lessons based on what your student needs, then tutoring in one-on-one situations is easily done and not very difficult at all. As a final note on tutoring, we would highly advise anyone who is teaching abroad to be careful if you are on contract and you want to tutor, as people have gotten themselves into sticky situations before and have been deported for breaking the law.