A Unique Tutoring Experience

Recently I have begun tutoring a student at Goshen High School in German. It has been a full four years since I last had a German class, and I've taken several Spanish classes during that time, but I was excited for the opportunity to jump back into this language that I used to know. I've realized that this tutoring experience will be particularly unique, however, because the student I am working with is autistic. Working with him is somewhat more challenging than other students for several reasons.

Not too surprisingly, my tutee is skilled in German and he picks up on linguistic concepts and rules quickly. Subjects such as foreign language can often be strong areas for autistic students. Though it may take him a bit of time to gather his thoughts, he has consistently answered questions regarding grammar on homework correctly during our tutoring sessions. Yet, I've found that for some reason he seems to act like he doesn't know as much as he does. This past week he asked me several questions during our tutoring session about very basic grammatical concepts that I know he has already learned. It appears that he may simply be attempting to pull our study session off-task. 

I've also found that my tutee will make other efforts to derail our tutoring meetings. He will ask questions that are not at all related to the content, and seems to have some trouble staying focused for even long enough to get through one full workbook exercise. When my tutee makes this attempts to take control of our study time, I have to do my best to acknowledge what he is saying, without letting him take over. Often I find myself answering his questions or comments with brief, one or two sentence replies, and then pulling him back in to work on the task at hand.

A few days ago, another person was added to our tutoring session, a traditional student who was struggling with the same concept that my tutee and I were working with. I realized as soon as he sat down that these were two very different students. I could have easily talked directly with the guest student for several minutes and he would have attentively focused on what we were trying to learn. However, simultaneously, my tutee was still having trouble staying focused and wanted to change the course of the session. So, I found myself trying to teach a little bit to each student, and simultaneously using a couple of teaching strategies. This experience reminded me of how unique students can be, especially in a classroom setting with 20 or more students. Therefore, it is very important to utilize various teaching styles and strategies to accommodate these learners.

(Action #1 - Get experience with all types of learners)