What a Good Tutor Does (It May Not Be What You Think)
Witty laying down the wisdom
As someone who’s spent so much time in education that I’ve begun to measure my tenure not in years but in fractions of a century, I’ve learned some important differences between teaching groups and tutoring individuals. These differences are worth keeping in mind for anyone thinking of hiring a tutor.
As is often the case, it’s useful to start by defining terms and addressing misconceptions. A tutor is not a homework buddy who swoops in to patch up skills just enough for the tutee to scrap by the next quiz or raise the GPA a bit. As for what a good tutor can be, I’m going to use what might seem a needlessly fancy term and attempt to justify its accuracy in the rest of the post. A good tutor is a cognitive architect: someone who builds the student’s internal systems for thinking, organizing, and learning.
The internal system building includes but is not limited to the following:
Executive function scaffolding
Cognitive load management
Metacognition (“How do I know what I know?”)
Task initiation and planning
Emotional regulation around academic tasks
Confidence and identity repair
I’m not suggesting the above are exclusive to tutors. Good classroom teachers aspire to do just as much; it’s the circumstances that differ. Classroom teachers, often faced with thirty students at a time, are forced to generalize, whereas tutors, usually focused on only one student, must specialize. A specialist is foremost a good diagnostician. From what the diagnostics reveal, tutors must build bespoke systems for their students–not systems that typically suffice the average student but those that specifically satisfy the individual student. The goal of the former is adequacy; the goal of the latter fulfillment. This, of course, is what you’re paying for.
In a post of this size, it would be impossible to do justice to each of the above mentioned systems. Instead, I’ll attempt to capture their collective spirit with a metaphor grounded in educational theory.
The metaphor maps three correspondences:
The student → video game player trapped in a first-person point of view
The tutor → the drone’s-eye camera above the game terrain
The subject matter → the virtual terrain
As you probably gathered, everything depends on point of view. The tutor is above the terrain, having traversed it many times, encountered every impasse, made every mistake, and eventually overcome every boss. The student is in the terrain, unsure of which way to turn, facing every obstacle for the first time. The tutor’s experience is third-person, past tense, reflective; the student’s is first-person, present tense, episodic.
All the sophisticated, system-building terms I loosed above can be encapsulated as this: The tutor lends the student the point of view from above, judicially, not so much as to induce overload, but just enough to scaffold progress.
Permit a brief interlude on that sweet spot. It’s what Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky calls the Zone of Proximal (ZPD) Development, an idea he introduced in 1934 (published posthumously in Mind in Society, 1978). The ZPD is the space between what a learner can do independently and what the learner can do with guidance from a more capable other, the tutor. It’s the conceptual home of scaffolding: the tutor provides temporary, targeted support that enables the learner to perform at a level just beyond the learner’s current mastery.
Interlude over, let’s return to the video game metaphor and point of view (POV). In many video games, players are able to switch at will between first-person and third-person POVs, from in the terrain to above it. This is not the case when the terrain is a school subject encountered for the first time, like Algebra or American History. To get the “view from above,” the student borrows or shares in the tutor’s POV.
For Vygotsky, higher mental functions begin as interpsychological (between people) before becoming intrapsychological (within the individual). In other words, cognition is first shared, then internalized. Just as all the verbalizing children do with others, even their stuffies, eventually develops into the adult’s inner monologue, so all the system building the student does with the tutor develops into the student’s own cognitive architecture.
Psychologists Jerome Bruner (1978, 1983) and Barbara Rogoff (1990, 2003) popularized the metaphorical language of “borrowing” or “loaning” cognitive structures, but the underlying idea is Vygotsky’s: the tutor temporarily provides the mental architecture — attention, strategy, metacognitive framing — that the learner eventually takes over.
Building on Vygotsky, Bruner explicitly frames learning as a joint problem space in which the adult provides “scaffolding” — temporary cognitive structure that the child gradually internalizes. In later work, Bruner deepens the idea that adults supply formats — structured cognitive routines — that children inhabit before they can generate them independently.
Rogoff describes learning as “guided participation” in which novices literally use the expert’s attention, strategies, and interpretive frame before developing their own. For Rogoff, cognitive processes are distributed, shared, and co‑constructed before becoming individualized. This is what I like to refer to as the teachers loaning students their consciousness.
To return to the metaphor, the tutor’s job is not to play the game for the student or to shout instructions from above. It is to lend the student a temporary third‑person vantage point — a way of seeing the terrain that is impossible from the ground. Over time, the student begins to anticipate the tutor’s questions, adopt the tutor’s strategies, and internalize the tutor’s way of scanning the landscape. What begins as borrowed cognition gradually becomes self‑generated cognition.
This is why a good tutor is not merely a content expert but a cognitive architect. The tutor is building the student’s internal systems for navigating unfamiliar terrain: how to approach a problem, how to manage overwhelm, how to decide what matters, how to monitor one’s own understanding, how to recover after a mistake, how to switch points of view at will. These are not tricks or shortcuts; they are durable mental structures.
It seems some imagine tutoring as a kind of academic triage — a patch, a boost, a rescue. But the real work is transient and more foundational. A good tutor is designing the student’s future independence. The goal is not to make the student dependent on the drone‑camera view, but to help the student develop an internal version of that view: a sense of orientation, a toolbox of strategies and skills, and a confidence that the terrain is navigable.
When this happens, grades improve almost as a side effect. What really changes is the way students relate to learning. They move from “I can’t do this” to “I know how to approach this.” They move from panic to perspective. They move from being trapped in the first‑person view to being able to shift vantage points at will — the hallmark of mature thinking.
That is what a good tutor actually does.
References
Bruner, J. S. (1978). The role of dialogue in language acquisition. In A. Sinclair, R. J. Jarvella, & W. J. M. Levelt (Eds.), The child’s conception of language (pp. 241–256). Springer.
Bruner, J. S. (1983). Child’s talk: Learning to use language. W. W. Norton.
Rogoff, B. (1990). Apprenticeship in thinking: Cognitive development in social context. Oxford University Press.
Rogoff, B. (2003). The cultural nature of human development. Oxford University Press.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes (M. Cole, V. John‑Steiner, S. Scribner, & E. Souberman, Eds.). Harvard University Press. (Original work published 1934)
