Reciprocal Teaching

As the next part of my education portfolio at Goshen College, I was assigned a tutoring assignment to work with high school or college age students one on one or in small groups emphasizing a specific subject.  I worked with three different students over the span of ten hours, focusing on biology and chemistry.  All three of these students are fellow students from Goshen College, so we met on campus for each of our sessions.  I worked with them one on one and in groups depending on their schedules.  Each session began with the student summarizing the content they had covered since the previous meeting.  Hearing from them allowed me to gain a picture of where they were and the major areas they were struggling with.  After this, the sessions proceeded in one of several ways.  In the chemistry sessions, we worked through many example problems.  I explained procedures, calculations, and reactions to the students and then we worked through practice problems until they felt comfortable completing them on their own.  I realized that by working on chemistry this way, the students felt supported in the beginning and more confident and independent as they practiced and my assistance was withdrawn.  Through tutoring chemistry, I also realized the importance of working through simple problems first and then gradually building up to more complex and difficult problems.  By demonstrating simple problems first, the students were able to draw connections to more advanced versions.

The sessions where I met with biology students proceeded very similarly to the chemistry sessions.  I had the students summarize as much of a unit or topic as they could remember.  We then went back to the beginning of the unit and worked through it again emphasizing the areas that were unclear to them and the details that they left out.  The student summaries were often more general and lacked specificity, so I focused on explaining the details in biological processes in ways that connected them to larger, broader topics.  The students expressed their struggle to understand how smaller pieces of information fit together into larger schemes.  Given this common struggle, I worked in each session to relate pieces of information to previous material as well as glimpses of material to come.  This process showed me that sometimes students need to simply hear a teacher or tutor reiterate information and organize it into smaller, more manageable yet relatable pieces.

Working with biology and chemistry students as a tutor was beneficial and comfortable for me.  I felt comfortable answering their questions and presenting the material in multiple ways because of my science major.  Since I have taken General Chemistry and Biological Principles before, I am familiar with the content and how I helped myself organize the information in multiple ways.  Given this foundation, I felt adequately prepared to help the students form their own strategies for remembering information and studying.  Being a tutor has helped me to practically apply the various methods of teaching that I have been studying in Educational Psychology this semester as well as appreciate the variety of learning styles present in a learning environment.  More than anything else I learned through this experience, I realized the importance of catering learning towards the student.  Teachers need to release their own concepts of studying and recognize that each student needs to figure out how they learn and remember information best.