Intelligence and How to Get It - Part 2, What Makes a Good Teacher/Tutor

Intelligence and How to Get It by Richard Nisbett. Are we Smarter than our Grandparents?
We discuss what makes good schools, teachers and tutors and give some ideas on how you can increase your intelligence.
For more information on Cooperative Learning, check out Robert Slavin's book on these techniques.
TUTORS
A lot of teaching is in the form of 1-on-1 teaching from tutors. Mark Lepper did research on this and made some great discoveries:
A surefire way to be a BAD tutor:
-Consider yourself a debugger. Explicitly tell the student she has made a mistake and give direct guidance in how to fix the error. None of Lepper’s most effective tutors took such a strictly cognitive, error-correction stance.
How do you become an effective tutor? Lepper gave us the 5 Cs.
1.CONTROL
a. Foster a sense of control in the student, making the student feel that she has command of the material and the capability to learn
2.CHALLENGE
a. Challenge the student, but at a level of difficulty that is within the student’s capability
3.CONFIDENCE
a. Express confidence in the student, assuring the student that the problem she just solved was a difficult one highlighting what the student got correct and not their failures…I will jump ahead to MINDSET and say that you should reward and recognize EFFORT and not failure or success. Effort and trying new things is critical to gaining confidence.
4.CURIOSITY
a. Foster curiosity by asking leading questions and by linking the problem to toher problems the student has seen that appear on the surface to be different.
5.CONTEXTUALIZE
a.Place the problem in a real-world context or in a context from a movie or TV show
WARNING: Never dumb down the material for the sake of self esteem. Most of what expert tutors do is ask questions. They ask leading questions and then ask students to explain their reasoning. They are less likely to give positive feedback...don’t make the teaching about RIGHT AND WRONG. This is not an evaluation, but an exercise in learning and effort.