Managing intermittent or infrequent lessons
Written by Daphne Lim - Updated
At some point as a KIS tutor, you’ll likely get asked to do casual or intermittent lessons with a student. Most of the time, this “ad hoc” system works out quite well, but sometimes, this irregularity can also get quite annoying.
Let’s go through how these lessons can work, and what to do when this “casual” pairing becomes more difficult to maintain.
Lesson Continuity
KIS Academics has a “Lesson Continuity” policy for clients, whereby if a student doesn’t have a lesson for 3 weeks in a row, we reserve the right to cancel their pairing. In most cases, tutors won’t enforce this policy since an ad-hoc lesson every once in a while is harmless, but the option is there.
Catering for Intermittent lessons
Many KIS tutors keep “timeslots” open for specific students - ie. Saturdays at 12pm are for Dan’s chemistry lesson. However, this system works only when the student wants regular lessons.
So the first thing to do if you’d like to maintain your intermittent students when your schedule gets busier is to deprioritise them.
- Don’t save them a timeslot.
- Prioritise regular timeslots with regular students.
- Schedule lessons with intermittent students whenever you’re able to and have the time.
Do not feel any obligation to save a timeslot for ad-hoc students as you never know whether they’ll want a lesson every fortnight or every 3 months. Just think of these clients as “extra work” on top of more regular lessons
Discussing Lesson Regularity with students
You might get to the point where you haven’t seen or even heard from a student for months. If you believe that a student is not doing lessons regularly enough to maintain the pairing, you can send a message to them along the lines of:
Hi there CUSTOMER, it’s been quite a while since our last lesson! For the purpose of scheduling, I’m trying to prioritise regular weekly lessons with my students. I’m just checking in to see if you’d like to try more regular sessions out, otherwise I’m afraid I might have to refer you to another tutor who can cater for more casual sessions whenever you need help. Please let me know asap!
Ideally, of course, you would want regular lessons with all your students. So before you handball them off to another tutor, please try to convince them of the benefits of regular sessions! Something like this has worked for me personally:
What I have noticed with my other students and even my own learning is how crucial having a routine is. You child won’t be inspired to study everyday so forget about inspiration. Habit and routine is far more dependable. Scheduling weekly sessions provides that regularity - and it will sustain your child whether they’re inspired or not. So if at all possible, I would strongly recommend you to schedule 2-3 weekly lessons with me and see how it goes!
If the customer doesn’t want more regular lessons and would like to be referred to another tutor you can send them this:
No worries! I’ll direct you straight to KIS as they can help you find a new tutor. Just go to this link and you can contact them and ask any question: https://kisacademics.com/w/contact-us
They usually respond pretty quickly!
Assignment Marking
If it gets to the point where the student is only reaching out to have you review an assignment or ask sporadic questions related to their work, you can always refer them to our assignment marking service instead: https://kisacademics.com/w/assignment-and-essay-marking
If you still require further assistance, shoot us a message in the #help channel on Slack, or send us an email at contact@kisacademics.com.
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