How to Find Perfect Teachers for Coaching Centres?

Home tutoring is a very special and sensitive kind of job. Very few jobs are usually so important and sensitive. A lot of the students’ academic performance and career depends on the home tutor. And each of the students is a contribution to the future generation, to the future of mankind. 

A coaching tutor is like a home tutor to multiple students at the same time. And there lies the main challenge. Otherwise a coaching tutor is just like another school teacher. But they perform the task that a school teacher usually either cannot cover or do not cover. 

Being a home tutor to a single student is not easy. Beside the skill and knowledge of domain subjects, they require a lot more than that. Understanding student psychology, teaching methods, communication and conversation language skills, leadership and influence skills, are just to name a  few virtues a home tutor has to keep and cultivate. 

Coaching tutors requires more skills and virtues than home tutors. Because they are home tutors to many simultaneously in the same class. 

A class is populated by students of different abilities and mindsets, even being in the same class and the same age group. In one perspective this becomes a great challenge to the purpose of integration and unified tutoring. 

In another perspective it can become a point of advantage compared to tutoring a single student at a time. Just that a coaching tutor needs to possess the knowledge and skill to leverage this diversity for the academic development and motivation of the students. 

Two words in the above title are worth noting. One is the word ‘basic’ and the other one is ‘successful’. 

The word basic is there to remind us that it is about the essential abilities and skills for anyone who is a coaching tutor or wants to become one. There can be more than basic, and usually we can find quite more of them in any experienced and well known coaching tutors. 

The word successful is more sublime and ambiguous. The word success itself is so relative and hard to define. What is success to one person can be utterly failure in the view of another person. 

Thus to find a standardized view or definition of success we need to attach the notion of economics with it. Without the backup of economics, the word success remains as eluding as anything.

When we can attach the economics factor with the definition of success then essentially the meaning of success boils down to monetary earning in exchange of time, effort and skill. Let us keep our notion of success to this idea only, at least for our current purpose. 

So a successful coaching teacher can be supposed to be the one who has more numbers of student populations in his coaching and he will earn more revenue. Both are not always too easy, but it can be achieved by following some process and meeting some requirements. Let me list a few such essential requirements – 

Knowledge and Expertise

One basic requirement of any good teacher, let it be of school, or coaching or of home tuition is his skill and expertise on his domain subject. Though there can be found many tutors who are not so efficient and effective in his domain, still to become renowned and high earning this plays an important role. Not that a tutor has to be the best in his subject, but he should possess a decent level of idea and knowledge on his subject.

Qualifications

Qualifications are another important benchmark for choosing a coaching tutor. This is perhaps the most short-cut way to find a tutor. You get the person with the desired qualifications or sometimes more, then you will happily know that you have chosen the right person for the right job. 

But unfortunately things are often a bit different. Most often people do not meet up the level or quality of their qualifications. Thus the role of qualifications can become quite complex and dicey. Still it will remain one of the most short-cut ways to find the right person for any job, including a coaching tutor. 

When a tutor teaches it is his knowledge and expertise that speaks and not the qualifications. This thing has to be remembered by the coaching recruiters as well as the applicant teachers both. 

Leadership Skills

Again it is not that a coaching tutor has to become a legendary leader, but also that does not mean that they do not need to have any leadership skills.

Already the profession or job of a teacher or a tutor demands a certain level or degree of leadership aptitudes and skills. Students need to listen, obey, follow, learn from and ultimately pay to their teachers. So many things simultaneously can be smoothly attempted and achieved only by the help of at least a nominal level of leadership, if not more. 

That was for any teacher in any setup. When the setup is a coaching class then the need for leadership escalates as the teacher now has to make simultaneously many students listen, obey, follow, learn and pay. Same can apply for schools and colleges as well but still there remains a difference. 

In schools usually the issues of leadership and responsibilities gets divided or shared among quite a many numbers of teachers and including the principal and other administrators. This makes the task of one individual teacher lighter and easier. But at a coaching center the total thing goes on the shoulders of either a single tutor or sometimes just a few of them, usually 2 to 5. Naturally the pressure of a coaching tutor usually cannot be felt by a general school or college teacher or not usually by the home tutor as well.

Communication Skills

This is another very crucial quality of any coaching teacher. Again this is required to a much higher degree than in home tutors because of the number of students. A coaching tutor usually addresses at least 10 or even much more number of students at a time in a classroom. Moreover, he is also expected and needed to reach the strength and weakness of every one of his students at a more individualized and detailed level than a standard school teacher. This is not a possible task without a very expertised dominance on method and mediums of communication. 

Communication has many dimensions and channels. Having a profound idea on the different aspects of effective communication can become a major advantage both for the coaching and the tutor. Any such tutor and coaching is likely to do far better business than its competitors. 

Human communications are conducted in many layers and dimensions. Like it is said that the maximum amount of communication a human does to another human is beyond the speech to reach the dimensions of body language and mind wave communications. Not all communications are done deliberately and technically, many happen almost instinctively and silently, not even exposed to the communicator. It depends on many factors like the mindwaves arising from mindsets, vocal tones, choice of language and words and many other things. 

A coaching tutor also needs to possess a certain level of understanding in the different communication channels. Communication channels consist of communication devices, human organs of hearing and speech, communication interfaces and languages, and so on. Even making an aesthetic yet thorough and technical presentation can become a big challenge for a coaching tutor not aware and skilled to perceive and make. 

Stress Management

It may sound a little bizarre when we say that a coaching teacher needs to have good stress management skills. But in reality that has to happen. The profession of teaching itself has a lot of points of stress generation. There are a lot of uncertain and unpredictable things that can generate a considerable amount of stress to the teachers and students both. 

For any teacher there are stresses like how the student will study, how he or she will perform in the class, how the questions will come in the exams, how the students will perform in the exam and so on. 

The most paradoxical story of the profession of teaching is that the teacher has to totally rely on a different person other than himself to generate the result of performance. Perhaps if the teacher needed to prove how he can study, how he can give exams then that would have been more predictable for him and as a result much less stressful because he could have a better control over the situation. 

But in the case of tutoring, there are a lot of other factors, like the student factor, the school or exam board teacher factor and the parent or guardian factor. All these factors together create much more control and influence on the academic situations than what the tutor alone can exert with his best effort. Hence often a tutor can feel himself in a situation which is totally unpredictable and uncontrollable. And when it is a profession of the tutor then naturally the stress is multidimensional. 

Over all these the students also shred a considerable amount of their stress on their home tutor or coaching tutors. Students nowadays almost always remain stressed by the very nature of the current education system and career pressure. Naturally they will keep radiating that stress. And that partly goes to the parents and partly goes to the tutors. The tutor has to keep calm and give all kinds of encouragement and positive support to the students despite the fact that he himself may be highly stressed. 

Home tutors and coaching tutors both need to take considerable amounts of stress from all dimensions. As coaching tutors usually teach much more students than home tutors hence the accumulated amount of stress for them can be expected to be more than home tutors. 

So we can see how coaching tutors face a good amount of stress and how a good stress management skill can help him and also his students. He has to destress both himself and his students as well. That can become a great challenge if a tutor is not equipped or poorly equipped with stress management skills.

Time Management

This part is easy to think about for any home tutor or coaching tutor. Both have considerable time pressure. Tutoring many students or many batches of students (as in a coaching center), requires one to be present in the class according to the pre scheduled time. 

Going to the office takes less time management skills as one person reaches his office only once a day. But a home tutor or a coaching tutor needs to reach his ‘office’ multiple times and multiple places a day. Without proper time management skills that can become another great source of stress for any tutor. 

Over this a tutor needs to finish the syllabuses and assignments with the students. And again for this he has to depend on factors other than his own performance. He has to depend quite a lot on factors like the performance of the students and so on for achieving the time targets. That is often a tough job. This also will require significant time management capabilities.

Problem Solving Skills

This is an obvious skill that any teacher needs to possess including coaching tutors. Actually this skill is not supposed to be mentioned for any teacher. But in real life this skill is one of the scarcely available skills. Even most of the teachers can be found to possess only a basic level of this skill. 

Any teacher or tutor with a significant amount of problem solving attitude and skill can become a great asset to any educational organization like schools and coaching centers.