Fear and anxiety are natural emotions we often feel in our daily encounters and interactions with others. New situations such as tutoring, where people start out as strangers, frequently heighten these feelings. Tutoring is not just any new situation, however; the great challenges, expectations, and social complications it brings compound normal fears and anxieties. When recounting their first days in the classroom, even veteran educators report feelings similar to those experienced by the following new tutor:

I was extremely nervous, since I was not very sure if the kids would like me. I felt a great deal of pressure, since I had never tutored in my life. I thought I could not offer the children anything, because I was questioning my abilities to teach. In addition, would the teacher like me? Would I get along with her? Then, scared and intimidated by the size and the beauty of the school, I did not know if I should turn back and run, or walk into the supervisor’s office with confidence and integrity.

Even if such anxious feelings subside after the first day, as the setting becomes somewhat familiar and the tutor-tutee relationship gets underway, new fears arise throughout the tutoring experience. Fear, anxiety, and insecurity are intrinsic to tutoring. Intricate situations and emotionally taxing incidents can make tutors feel not only helpless, but een a threat to the educational progress of their tutees. As complicated and discouraging as such feelings may be, your knowledge and application of certain governing attitudes and practices will equip you with some basic methods of dealing with both first-day and ongoing problems and concerns.

Because many tutors share the same fears and anxieties, we have found a set of general attitudes and practices that, when brought into the tutoring scenario, can ease these concerns. The most common fears that new tutors express surface in such questions as Will my student like me? Will I like my new student? Will I be able to fit in and relate to a student who is very different from me (in terms of gender, age, race, ethnicity, religion, or socioeconomic status)? Will I be able to teach everything that there is to be taught? Will I succeed as a tutor?

Such questions are not only common, they are reasonable for anyone entering a new or unfamiliar tutoring situation. But they need not be paralyzing. In spite of your fears and anxieties, rewarding experiences will emerge once you have made a connection with your tutee. When your tutees realize that you tutor because you care and that you are genuinely interested in them and in having a strong tutor-tutee bond, tutoring becomes an exeprience filled with moments of pleasure, satisfaction, and joy, and your fears and anxieties recede. Tutors often come out of their tutoring relationships with a much deeper sense of satisfaction than they had expected. Reactions often include such sentiments as “I got so much more than I offered,” “He’ll never know how much he affected me,” and “I found this experience to be the most important thing I’ve ever done.”

We have found that most successful tutoring partnerships spring from a common underlying concept: unconditional acceptance. Unconditional acceptance is the basic for the set of attitudes and practices we have been discussing here. It is also the most basic and essential foundation for a strong, succcessful tutoring relationship.

One of the best ways to overcome or at least dilute your fears and anxieties is to try to ground yourself in unconditional acceptance as you enter your tutoring scenario. The first step in doing this is to adopt a certain set of attitudes before entering and while engaging in the tutoring situation. These attitudes can both ease tutor’s fears and shape tutors into better and more open teachers. The essential attitudes for tutoring, all flowing from unconditional acceptance, involve giving up expectations, displaying enthusiasm and interest, feeling empathy.

These components not only help develop a suitable and successful tutoring mindset, but they lay the foundation for a number of effective tutoring practices. We have found three general practices very useful in creating a comfortable and successful tutoring relationship: being patient, being observant and asking questions, and understanding students on their own level.