Everyone aims to improve his skills. An individual worse at something wants to get better and a better person wants to achieve the best. In order to fulfill the need to improve, one may seek help. School goers usually seek help outside the school in the form of tutoring or academic coaching. These individuals may look for one on one personal tutoring or group tutoring online or offline depending on their requirements.
Further, parents aim to hire a tutor or an academic coach to be able to provide their child with the best education. Schools with different curriculums IB or IGCSE have the best resources to be able to impart quality education. But tutoring and academic coaching help students practice on a regular basis and ultimately improve their grades.
Moreover, the education system has become hybrid in nature in order to fulfill the demand of the students and the parents. Due to various factors, now people also have a choice of online tutoring to be able to take sessions at their own comfort and pace. The idea is to have the best teaching platform available even if it costs slightly more than other platforms. One-on-one tutoring or academic coaching is another variant that parents prefer so that their children can get personalized attention.
If one is looking for IB courses or IGCSE courses, one may research about different offline or online tutoring platforms pertaining to those courses and choose the best to achieve the desired results. While exploring the options would you look for a tutor or an academic coach? This would be easy to answer once we know the differences between the two. Though a tutor and a coach may not look different, in reality, there are some differences. Also, different students may have different perspectives about a tutor and coach. While one may consider a tutor to work on his weakness and a coach to make him an expert.
The following are some of the differences between tutoring and academic coaching:
| Basis of distinction | Tutoring | Academic Coaching |
| Meaning/Focus | A tutor mainly focuses on building specific skills and prepares a student to learn different subjects at school. | An academic coach’s main aim is to work on various strategies with the student. The purpose is to keep the student more organized and motivated. |
| Benefits | Tutoring would be beneficial for students who are willing to improve in specific areas like math, science, English, etc. | Academic coaching will benefit those students who are already good at specific skills but need to learn different strategies for being organized. It would also help in increasing the motivation level of the student. |
| Structure of the session | Content or subject knowledge | Strategy and time management techniques |
| Offering | An institute or an individual can offer tutoring services. | An institute or an individual can offer tutoring services.
In today’s times, various institutes are offering academic coaching-style programs for strategy building. |
| Duration | Tutoring programs may go as long as one year for an entire grade or maybe just for a specific semester or for a particular course. | Different institutes have different programs based on the requirements of the students. The duration may vary from 3 months and beyond. |
| Fee structure | Varies from subject to subject | Varies from program to program. |
There is a very thin line between tutoring and academic coaching but the distinction does help us achieve the desired results. Some tutors just like coaches may work on strategy building and sometimes a coach like a tutor may work on building a specific skill.
There could be several benefits of hiring a coach:
Different coaching institutes provide different study programs. These programs are created to train the students on how to apply strategies to be able to achieve accuracy and a better score. The purpose of strategy building exercise is to enable the child to work efficiently on different questions.
A tutor helps a child in mastering the subject knowledge but when it comes to solving the questions related to that subject in a given time frame the child may not be able to solve it and may require more time. So, while a tutor prepares a student for the exam, a coach trains the student on how to take that exam.
Therefore, whether to hire a tutor or a coach totally depends on the requirements of a child. It is important to identify the needs of the student so that accordingly he could be trained by a tutor or a coach. Analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of the will help in making a wise decision.
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