April 2025 "The Importance of Connection" by Ulysses Ochoa, Halenna Castillo, Emily Rawlings, Andrea Martinez

Connections: What are They and Why are They Important:

Merriam-Webster defines connection as “The act of connecting or the state of being connected”. Connection is an essential aspect of tutoring.

An example would be the connections we tutors have with one another.

We, as tutors, aim to foster a comfortable and supportive tutoring environment where our tutees can thrive academically. Building strong connections with our tutees is key to their growth and development. Remember, it is important to understand that as a tutor, your job is meaningful; you are a part of a student’s journey towards academic success. By that logic, you and your tutee are already connected, demonstrating why connection is essential. 

It might seem a bit silly, but letting a student get to know about your interests can be a great way to make the students feel less intimidated about having a session with you! Talking back and forth or simply answering questions about your hobbies during the session itself also aids in creating a relaxing environment. An example of using interests to create a more relaxed tutoring environment specific to the RWC is using bio videos. Each tutor is required to create a bio video covering basic information about themselves, including both academic and personal interests.

While a tutor should strive to be professional, they should also avoid being overly clinical. Tutors work on keeping professional and respectful boundaries, maintaining an engaged and positive attitude so that the mood is light. If you see a student every week, do the small things, such as asking how their day is going. Little, sincere gestures like that convey that you care about the student and the progress they are displaying through your sessions with them.

Starting the Tutoring Session with Fun Activities

What is the definition of critical thinking? In short, it is making connections; that is my definition, and it has been my definition for about a year now. But making connections is not just about  bridging  gaps  in  knowledge; it  is also about personal connection, in both spirit and conversation. In spirit, it is a conversation for another time. Connections, or making them, is simply the art of growing a canon of information. As tutors, we must make use of our canons of knowledge and apply it in our sessions with our tutees. This connection of our canons will help reinforce critical thinking by making meaningful connections and grounding coursework information to other knowledge. 

This can be done in a variety of ways: First, a tutor can start a tutoring session with a fun activity, such as free writing or small talk. Sounds pretty simple, right? However, when executed properly, these activities can foster critical thinking and give a tutor a look into a tutee's mind, thus allowing a tutor to better assist the tutee.

When prompting a ‘free write’, a tutor can give a student a random, college-appropriate image, or a topic, and ask the tutee to write about it freely for 5 minutes. This simply gets the tutee's brain in gear for writing, while simultaneously allowing the tutor to see how the tutee writes. From there, the tutor and tutee could conduct “small talk” about the content of the free write, and begin connecting the information to the course material. 

Relating Your Experiences

Even though every student is different, there are some universal college experiences that you can use to relate to your tutee and make them feel more at ease. You can mention how you struggled with a class or concept, and that you managed to overcome. For example, tell your tutee that you also have trouble writing a conclusion for your paper, or also write long run on sentences that you have to go back to fix. Relaying how you yourself have faced challenges with assignments and that the struggle is normal are great ways to let your our tutee they are not alone. 

Personalizing the Tutoring Session

Providing the same tutoring session to each student can result in a disconnect between the tutor and tutee, but tutors are meant to create a connection with their tutees while they work towards a common goal. Consequently, it is important to personalize tutoring sessions to foster a sense of belonging and connection. 

To create connection, it is helpful to personalize the session in accordance with tutee learning styles. If someone asked me to sit down, unmoving, for several hours to read and write about something as uninteresting to me as the terms and conditions on any agreement, I know I would throw a fit like a child forced to eat steamed kale. Likewise, reading and writing can be tedious to some students, and their pre-selected topics may not relate to their interests. However, even if a topic is incredibly boring, the process of writing about it does not have to be. Let us say that a tutee is assigned a 5-page essay about 3 literary devices that authors use. After taking the Personality Max quiz, the student was found to be a visual learner, so first, the tutor can have the student create a chart defining all the potential literary devices he or she is interested in. Next, the student can choose 3 colors to highlight their favorite literary devices. When conducting research, it is a good idea to print out prospective articles and have the tutee highlight the sentences that could be important to their paper, color coding the quotes based on the literary device the sentences are talking about. If the student is a kinesthetic learner, have the tutee write down each of the 3 chosen literary devices on an index card, and after printing out the articles, tutees can cut out the quotes they choose to place each below their respective literary devices, effectively piecing together their paragraphs while demonstrating the different sections needed in each paragraph. However, if the student is an auditory learner, conversations are the way to go. It is important to ask effective questions aimed at increasing their knowledge and understanding of the topics and tasks at hand. When conducting the writing itself, it can be a good idea to transcribe their words. For example, in the first body paragraph, the tutor can ask, “Which literary device would you like to talk about first?” “What are you going to claim about this literary device?” “How can we make that a statement?” Then, the tutor can write this statement down to act as the topic sentence for the paragraph and move on to the next sentence. By catering to the tutees’ preferred learning styles, progress is developed, and the idea that effective collaboration is possible with a tutor creates a sense of trust and connection so that reading and writing does not feel like being trapped in a dungeon and being forced to eat unflavored greens.

Second, to create a sense of connection between the tutor and tutee, incorporate the tutee’s interests. If I am being taught about math by a teacher who loves cars—the old ones, the new ones, the ones that sound like they ate too many beans, and especially his Cybertruck—then I would not learn a single number nor would I feel particularly connected to the teacher because neither math nor cars particularly excite me. However, if the teacher used math to make art or explain how geometry can be used to create sewing designs, I would be much more interested and more likely to talk to the teacher after class. Consequently, it is important to relate the tutee’s personal interests to the concepts of reading and writing. For example, if a tutee is interested in sports, the tutor and tutee can start out with the “game plan” or the outline, “the opening play,” or the introduction, and then “pass the ball” when transitioning to the next idea. If a tutee is interested in music, the “verses and chorus” can refer to the supporting ideas in the body paragraphs, “crescendo” can refer to building up to the strongest point, and “tuning the instrument” can refer to revising and editing. When using the tutee’s personal interests to learn reading and writing concepts, a personalized approach is accomplished, and a sense of mutual understanding and connection is established.

Lastly, to create a sense of connection, adapt the pacing of the session. In a classroom environment, there can be a disconnect between the individual and their teacher. The teacher can move quickly like a centipede on Red Bull, but the student only has one hand to jot down notes and only one human brain to process concepts. Consequently, it is advantageous to make sure to move at the student’s pace. We should not be lassoing our tutees, but we should be trotting together collaboratively off into the sunset of success. For example, often times, students will book a 30-minute session when they would be better off with an hour-long session. Although the time constraint may feel restraining on the tutor’s capacity to help the tutee, it is important to gain as much progress as possible in a way that encourages retention. If a tutee does not understand a concept, even if it takes 29 minutes of the 30 minute session, the tutee will be better off knowing the main topic for their essay and will be better off because they were not pressured to maintain a pace well outside of their comfort zone. In essence, a relaxed environment that allows for the tutee to process each topic and concept will not only encourage retention but also build connection since the tutee is more likely to return to a tutor who they feel comfortable with—a tutor who works with the tutee at their pace.

In the end, taking a tailored approach to tutoring portrays that the tutor cares about and understands the tutee, which creates a sense of connection, and instead of feeling like a student in a sea of students, tutees will feel seen and heard, and much more likely to remember what they have learned.