There is a particular kind of pupil who is every teacher’s dream and, rather ironically, one of the easiest to overlook.
They arrive on time. They have their equipment. They get on with the work without being nagged. They don’t shout across the classroom, throw things, wander around or demand to know when the lesson is going to end. If they don’t understand something, they quietly struggle with it rather than interrupting the lesson to ask for help. When another pupil behaves badly, they wait patiently while the teacher deals with it. When the teacher asks a question, they may know the answer but keep their hand down. They are, in other words, absolutely no trouble whatsoever. And that is precisely the problem.
Every teacher knows that classroom attention is finite. There are only so many minutes in a lesson and only one teacher at the front of the room. If three pupils are arguing, somebody has forgotten their book, another is refusing to work and somebody else is calling out every thirty seconds, it is inevitable that those pupils will consume a disproportionate amount of the teacher’s attention. The conscientious pupil sitting quietly in the corner does not create an urgent problem to be solved. They can wait. The trouble is that “can wait” can gradually become “doesn’t need anything”.
Anyone who has spent any time standing in front of a mixed ability class will recognise the problem. When I was teaching in schools, I was acutely aware of the pupils who required my attention because they were noisy, disruptive, distressed or simply determined to make their presence known. The reality was that they were impossible to ignore: they would put their hands up repeatedly, call out, wander over to the teacher’s desk, complain about the work or announce that they had finished when they very obviously had not. Meanwhile, there might be another child sitting quietly a few desks away, doing exactly what I had asked them to do. The temptation is always to assume that such a child is fine.
One of the things I eventually learned as a classroom teacher was that I had to make a conscious effort to seek out the pupils who were not seeking me out. It sounds absurdly obvious when written down, but in the middle of a busy lesson it is remarkably easy to forget and good teachers are hyper-vigilant to this danger. I would walk around the classroom deliberately, stopping beside students who had not asked for help and looking at what they were doing. I would ask questions of children who rarely volunteered answers and towards the end of my career moved increasingly towards a “no hands” policy for questioning. I made a point of talking to students who had been quietly working while I dealt with somebody else’s vocal crisis. Sometimes the answer would be, “Yes, I’m fine.” Sometimes it would be, “Actually, I don’t understand this bit.” Occasionally, the response would be something that made me realise that I had been making assumptions about a child I thought I knew rather better than I actually did.
There is a wider problem here, because the quiet pupil is not necessarily the same thing as the high-achieving pupil. We sometimes conflate the two. A child can be conscientious and completely lost. They can be desperate not to draw attention to themselves because they are embarrassed about not understanding. They can be working incredibly hard while producing mediocre results because nobody has realised that there is a fundamental gap in their knowledge. Conversely, a child who appears quiet and self-sufficient may be capable of considerably more than the work in front of them is demanding.
The classroom is a social environment as well as an educational one, and children learn very quickly how to operate within it. Some discover that the easiest way to obtain adult attention is to demand it. Others learn that being quiet, compliant and self-sufficient is rewarded with trust and independence. There is nothing inherently wrong with either mode of behaviour, but the consequence can be that the children who need the teacher’s attention least urgently receive the least of it.
This is one reason why I became rather fond of what I used to think of as “quiet checking”. I didn’t need to make a grand intervention or announce to a pupil that I had noticed them. Sometimes I simply needed to stand beside them and look at their work. Sometimes I would ask them to explain what they were doing. Sometimes I would deliberately ask them a question that I knew they were capable of answering, simply because I wanted to hear their voice in a classroom in which the louder pupils had rather more presence.
It is important not to turn this into another job for the child. Telling a quiet pupil that they need to “put their hand up more” is not the answer and I am agog at how often a client’s parent will convey this to me as “feedback” from their child’s school; I had thought those days were over, but I’m afraid there are still thousands of teachers repeating this empty mantra as if it were gold dust. If a child has spent years learning that other people are louder, more confident or more demanding than they are, telling them to become louder is basically telling a timid person that the solution to their problem is to be more extroverted. In truth, it’s the adults that need to change their methodology.
Tutoring is particularly valuable for children of this kind. One-to-one tuition does something that is almost impossible to reproduce in a conventional classroom: it removes the competition for attention entirely. There is no disruptive pupil waiting to be dealt with. There is no classmate calling out the answer before another child has finished thinking. There is no embarrassment about asking a question in front of twenty-nine other people. There is no need to decide whether your problem is important enough to interrupt the teacher. The teacher is already there, and they are there for you. For some children, this is simply transformative.
I have had students who are perfectly capable academically but are extraordinarily reluctant to ask questions in school. They don’t want to be the person who holds everybody else up, or they don’t want to admit that they don’t understand something that their classmates appear to understand. They would rather go home confused than raise their hand and expose that confusion publicly. In a one-to-one lesson, that inhibition often disappears quickly and the child learns, with my encouragement, to interrupt me as often as they wish. There is nobody else to impress, nobody else to keep up with and nobody waiting impatiently while you work something out. You can say, “I don’t understand any of this,” and instead of feeling that you have just made a public declaration of inadequacy, you have simply given your tutor some useful information.
This brings us to the huge advantage that one-to-one tuition boasts over whole-class teaching. In a classroom, a teacher has to make decisions about what the entire class needs. Even the very best teacher cannot spend twenty minutes exploring one student’s misunderstanding while twenty-nine other pupils sit around waiting: but a tutor does not have that problem. If I discover that a student has misunderstood something fundamental, I can stop and deal with it. We can approach it from another direction, I can give them another example, I can ask them to explain it to me and, most importantly of all, I can discover precisely where the misunderstanding occurred and deal with that rather than simply repeating the explanation that didn’t work the first time. Equally, if a student understands something immediately, I don’t need to spend another fifteen minutes explaining it to the entire group. We can move on immediately: the lesson belongs entirely to that child.
I suspect that most teachers, if asked, would be able to name the pupils who have demanded the most of their attention. We remember the ones who made us laugh, the ones who drove us mad, the ones who needed pastoral support and the ones whose behaviour seemed to occupy an extraordinary proportion of our working lives. The quieter children are sometimes harder to remember. Tutoring can give them a voice.
