Coaching conversations with personal tutees

When having a tutorial with a tutee, personal tutors can adopt a coaching style of conversation. This will typically be:

• Structured conversation, e.g. through goal setting, exploration, generation of options and action planning
• Future-focussed
• Solution-focussed
• Tutee-focussed

Listening, summarising and questioning

An important element of having a productive coaching conversation is to ensure active listening. Being attentive to your tutee and listening out for repeated words, hesitations, emotional words such as “it is a struggle”, “I am battling with…”, can help you to tune in fully to what your tutee is really saying.

When summarising you might use "So you're saying to me that..." as a way of ensuring you’ve understood what it is that your tutee has said.

When asking your tutee questions, you are likely to have a more productive tutorial if you use open-ended questions to expand the discussion e.g. “How?” and “What?”,  rather than closed questions which require only a “Yes, no” answer.

An important element of having a productive coaching conversation is to ensure active listening. Being attentive to your tutee and listening out for repeated words, hesitations, emotional words such as “it is a struggle”, “I am battling with…”, can help you to tune in fully to what your tutee is really saying.

When summarising you might use "So you're saying to me that..." as a way of ensuring you’ve understood what it is that your tutee has said. 

When asking your tutee questions, you are likely to have a more productive tutorial if you use open-ended questions to expand the discussion e.g. “How?” and “What?” rather than closed questions which require only a “Yes, no” answer.