What Are the Advantages of Group Learning?

I am not a teacher but an awakener. Robert Frost

As a tutor, you may be asking yourself whether allowing students to study in groups will yield greater results or not. It is important to question whether the type of tutorial lessons that you choose to conduct will benefit students or not.

More and more South African children are needing tuition and parents throughout South Africa are realising how expensive paying for school and tuition can be. While most parents would prefer one-on-one private tuition classes for their children, they understand this is not financially possible.

Parents are willing to settle for group tutorials, but the tutor must be confident in his or her ability to get each student in a tutorial group to understand subject content.

Since the demand for group tutorials is growing, the tutor must be willing to supply his or her service. When you decide that you want to teach groups of children at once, you still need to remember to make sure that every learner within the respective group is learning and that each student is supported throughout his or her learning journey.

Planning how exactly these study groups will work before you start is a great suggestion. If you cannot make heads or tails of where to get started, revisit a previous article to learn how to plan private group tutorials.

Once you have planned how you will conduct private tutorial classes, consider how you can explain the advantages of these group classes to parents who may be interested in your tutorial service. You also need to know what the advantages of group learning are for you.

The Advantages of Group Learning for Students

Before you ponder about the advantages of group tutorials for yourself, you need to know what the advantages of group tutorials are for the learners.

Albeit in groups, group classes give learners a second chance to learn concepts that they haven't understood at school.  Group lessons give learners a relaxed environment to learn. Students tend to be more vocal and less scared to answer questions when they are learning in smaller groups.

Parents are aware of how group classes do actually help their children to not only excel academically, but to gain the confidence that they need to excel. The truth is not all parents can afford private tuition for their children. Group tutorial classes allow children to excel as well, but these classes don't necessarily have a hefty price tag attached to them.

Undeniably private tuition works out rather expensive for all families, so it makes more sense for parents to opt for group classes for their children, so as to still allow their children to get academically supported. The idea of group classes is still to close the learning gaps that learners may have.  In terms of group tutorials, each child in the group shares the cost of the class.

Group tutorials give learners the chance to sit in small groups and work together. Some children actually enjoy working with other children and they do tend to thrive when they work with others. Children do learn well from each other, so this is an added advantage of group tutorials.

Another advantage of group classes is learners in these classes do get to engage in a variety of activities this is because the tutor generally sources a wide variety of activities to accommodate all the different learning styles in the class.

You must remember that it is much easier to conduct some classes in groups, however, guitar lessons can be best conducted privately.

Group Learning Techniques for Tutors

In South Africa alone, there are numerous tutors already offering group tutorial lessons for all the different primary and secondary school subjects.

It is always a good idea to liaise with established tutors and tutorial centers.  As a potential group class tutor, you need to decide what type of tutorial lessons you would like to conduct. You could focus solely on homework help, have exam preparation groups, or conduct holiday group tutorial classes during the school holidays only. Once you find your niche, you will certainly excel in giving these tutorials.

The key to being a great group tutor is to tutor a whole group of learners, but still devote some time to working alone with each student in your tutorial group.

Having less students per class is a great suggestion as you will notice that learners in a small group learn faster than learners in bigger groups. When you tutor a smaller group of learners, you can spend more time with each student, adapting to their learning styles, and helping all of your students to achieve the grades that they really deserve.

Make sure to have a specific space for your tutorial classes.  You must have a stimulating learning environment where all the students in your group can come to learn and to excel. Further research on creating the right environment for tuition is a great suggestion. Consider reading the where to teach private group tutorials blogpost for further inspiration.

In order to set yourself apart from other tutors who offer group tutorial classes, you must be willing to go over and above and cater for each student.

Can you really become a group tutor who is in high demand? You most certainly can! However, you need to know what to expect and what is expected from you before you even step into your first group tutorial class. Read the blogpost about how to conduct small group tutorials so you can be further inspired on how to be the best group tutor that you can be.

Groupwork Benefits from Tutors

For one, you will be serving the learners in your community by giving them the opportunity to excel at school. That on its own is one of the greatest benefits of providing this service.

The more students that you have in a class, the more money you will make and the less time you will have to spend on providing tuition during your day.

You can charge anything from R80 to R150 for an hour of group tutorial lessons. The cheaper your rate is for group lessons; the more students will want to join your tuition classes.  The more students that you have in your groups, the more money you will earn.

Group tutorials are great as you can help to build learner's confidence, but you can also rely on the learners in your group to build each other's confidence.  When students support each other's learning, they can certainly encourage each other to do even better.

Group tutorials for languages are great, especially when all the children in the class are learning a language that is not their mother tongue language. If your students are learning French for the first time, they can always meet up with each other after the group lessons and communicate with each other in French. If learners socialise and teach each other, there will be far less work for you.

As a tutor, tutoring in groups help as you can plan one lesson for your group instead of playing many lessons for each individual student. You save much more time when you teach more learners at once as opposed to teaching learners individually and using up all the hours in your day to conduct these lessons.

Disadvantages of Collaborative Learning

While there are certainly benefits of collaborative learning for both students and teachers, there are some disadvantages of group lessons.

While all seems rosy when it comes to group tutorials, everything is not as it seems. For one, some students are more advanced than others just like in the classroom. If certain learners in your group setting cannot seem to grasp a particular concept, you may need to revisit these concepts quite a few times. However, the redundancy may be boring for students who have already grasped the concept the first time.

You could say that one of the main disadvantages of group tutorials is that not all of your learners learn at the same rate.

The same struggles that teachers in the brick-and-mortar classroom face is the same struggle that you will face when trying to teach a concept to students with different learning abilities.

Another consideration when you are group tutor is that you need to make sure all of your students can make class at a specific time. Therefore, you need to ask all your students and their parents what times and days of week are convenient for them before planning your class.

You will also have to think about how to catch up a student who couldn't make a class.

Do you feel like the advantages outweigh the disadvantages?

If this is the case, you can continue on your journey to become a group tutor. If you are a student and feel that you will benefit from group lessons, find a tutor willing to cater for smaller group classes. You don't need to search far and wide, you can simply look at the Superprof website for the details of tutors offering group tutorials in your area.

With Superprof tutors, you need not worry too much about the cost of classes. All Superprof tutors offer the first lesson for free, and you can always choose a Superprof tutor that matches your budget.

If you are a tutor looking to get started and find students, all you have to do is create your profile on Superprof. The Superprof website allows you to state what subject or subjects you would like to teach and where you would like to teach these subjects.

If you don't have a tutoring venue that will cater for a group of students, you can always consider giving online group lessons. In this way, you can tutor a group of children from all over South Africa.