Two methods are worse than one

Every year we watch a small number of students take an unnecessary risk. Their parents are almost always worrying about something else.

These students are often working hard, so effort is rarely the problem. The danger sits somewhere less obvious: in something that looks, from the outside, like extra help.

The student who nearly talked himself out of a top grade

One of our students this year seemed to be in an excellent position. His writing was genuinely strong: high quality, and full of ideas that were his own. In a subject where the exam is largely an assessment of how well you write, that already covers most of what is being tested.

What worried us was his approach, rather than his ability. When we set a topic, he would question whether it was the right topic. When we taught a technique and explained what it was for, he would wonder whether a different one might be better. Again and again the same suggestion came back: could I just do past papers instead?

Past papers are useful, but they are the last stage of preparation rather than the first, and doing them before the method is in place mostly teaches a student to repeat what they already do.

Then his family did something a lot of families do. Worried by his doubts, they brought in a second tutor, a good one with real examining experience, who advised him to stop using the approach we had taught him.

He came very close to switching. In the end he decided to stay with the method, worked it properly, and finished the summer with two grade 9s.

We are pleased for him, but it could have ended differently: the risk he took was much larger than he realised. We have seen the other version of this story. A student changes technique close to the exam, and afterwards we are explaining to a parent that their child did not use what they were taught.

Imagine you are his parent. Your son writes well, he keeps doubting the method he is being taught, and a second tutor with real examining experience has just advised him to stop using it. Two good teachers ought to be better than one. Where, exactly, is the risk?

Two methods give a student the worst of both

If a student learns method A properly, they do well. If they learn method B properly, they will probably also do well, since there is more than one respectable way to write an essay.

What fails is half of each, because a method for writing an essay is a structure, not a set of tips. It has to be practised until it runs without conscious thought, so that in the exam the student’s attention is free for the actual thinking. Research on how people learn complex skills is consistent about what beginners need. Learners who do not yet have expertise in a subject need explicit, consistent guidance while they build it, because they do not yet have the mental map that tells them what matters.^[1] That map is exactly what is still being built, so we think switching approaches halfway damages the first map instead of adding a second one.

The obvious fix, when a student doubts the method, is a second opinion from somebody with more experience. Research on how guidance works suggests why that can go wrong. Guidance that helps a beginner can actively hurt someone who is already skilled, and advice aimed at an expert can be useless to a beginner.^[2] How can correct advice do harm? Researchers call this pattern the expertise reversal effect. A very experienced person can give perfectly correct advice that is wrong for the learner in front of them, because the advice assumes knowledge that learner does not yet have.

So when two capable people give a student different instructions, the student gets two incomplete systems instead of twice the help. Deciding between those systems takes exactly the judgement the student does not yet have. Most students, in our experience, respond by doing a bit of both. The answer they write has the shape of neither method.

Teaching that pulls one way works better

There is no study that tests “hiring a second tutor for the same subject”. But there is a lot of research on what happens when teaching pulls in one direction rather than several.

The clearest example is a study of Chicago schools. It measured how coherent each school’s instructional programme was: whether staff worked to a common framework, sustained over time, rather than running many unconnected initiatives. Schools with stronger coherence made higher gains in student achievement.^[3]

The Chicago finding is about schools rather than tutors, so it cannot simply be applied to tuition. But we think the mechanism is the same one, and it points the same way: learning improves when the instruction a child receives connects up, and suffers when it competes.

Researchers on private tutoring have made the narrower point directly: supplementary tutoring does not automatically add value, and where its approach conflicts with the child’s main teaching, it can work against that teaching.^[4]

This is not an argument against second opinions

Coming from a tutor, this argument could easily sound self-serving, as if we were telling you never to look for a second opinion.

So if you are unsure whether your child’s tuition is working, you should absolutely say so, ask what the method is meant to achieve, and ask what evidence there is that it works. A tutor who cannot answer that is a problem.

We can answer it: our programme is built on educational research, the techniques are designed to hit the criteria examiners actually mark against, and we have years of results from students who arrived on 3s and 4s. That is the basis on which we ask a family to commit to it — not because we say so, but because the method has been tested and the evidence is there to look at.

Asking for a second opinion does no harm. What causes damage is running two competing methods at the same time, in the same subject, for the same exam, because one of the two methods is always being half-abandoned.

Trust the process — and check it

Our own footer has said the same thing for a long time: trust the process, ace the exam. It is easy to read that line as “do as you are told”, but it means something more specific.

A method is a bet that a particular sequence, practised properly, produces the marks. The only way to find out is to run it — properly, for long enough, with the work marked and corrected along the way. A student who follows it for a term has real evidence about whether it is working. A student who keeps half-leaving it for something else has no evidence at all, and has spent the term anyway.

In our experience, the students who transform their grades are almost never the ones who found a better method, but the ones who picked a good one and stayed with it.

Before you add extra help

Look at the marked work first. Do not judge by how confident your child feels or by how the lesson felt. Marks on written work, over a few weeks, against the examiner’s criteria, will tell you whether the teaching is working.

Give the method a full term before you judge it. Two weeks is long enough to sample a method, but not long enough to judge it.

Ask the new tutor which approach they teach. Ask that question before the first lesson begins. If the approach is a different one, you are choosing between two methods rather than adding to one.

Tell each tutor that the other one exists. Most of the harm we see comes from a student privately trying to satisfy two sets of instructions that nobody has reconciled. Neither adult can fix a conflict they do not know about.

If the two approaches conflict, pick one and stop the other. Half of each is the version that fails. Your child should not be the one making that choice, because judging between two methods is the skill they are still building.

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