When a Student Arrives With No Questions

Why bring your questions collapses as a lesson plan

A student who can accurately name what they do not understand is already most of the way to understanding it. Naming a gap requires standing outside it, and confusion does not work like that. What a stuck student can actually report is a feeling, and the two available words are fine and all of it.

Nobody has ever arrived at a lesson and said that their problem is an insecure grasp of negative numbers from three years ago which is now quietly breaking every equation they solve. That sentence is the tutor's job to produce. Asking the student to produce it, week after week, is how an hour becomes a chat.

Three silences that look identical

I have no questions can mean three different things and they need three different lessons. Telling them apart takes about ten minutes and is the most valuable ten minutes in the hour.

The third is the one people mistake for the second. A student who has decided that admitting confusion is dangerous will sit through a diagnostic and get things wrong cheerfully enough, and still tell you nothing. That is repaired by putting a mistake of your own on the board and asking them to find it, not by better worksheets.

• Genuinely secure: the work is too easy. Move up a level, do not revise.
• Cannot locate the gap: the ordinary case. Diagnose, then teach the biggest thing you find.
• Will not say: a trust problem. Make the failure yours before asking them to own theirs.

Start from the last thing somebody marked

A school test with 62 per cent written on the top contains more usable information than an hour of conversation. But read the errors, not the score. Three students can score the same and need three unrelated lessons.

Sort every wrong answer into one of three piles. Method errors mean the topic was never understood and has to be retaught. Recall errors, a times table missed or a formula misremembered, mean the topic is fine and the fluency underneath it is not. Reading errors, where the student solved a question nobody asked, are the most common of the three in exam years and the least often addressed, because they look like carelessness rather than a teachable skill.

The mixed set, and reading the pen

Where there is no marked work, we use ten questions drawn from across the last three months, deliberately out of order so that nothing is signposted by the topic it sits under. The student works; the tutor says nothing at all, which is harder than it sounds.

The information is in the behaviour rather than the answers. How long before the first mark on the page. Whether a diagram gets drawn without being asked for. Whether units are written down as they go or added at the end. Whether anything is checked. Whether a question is skipped and returned to, or skipped and abandoned. A student can score eight out of ten and still show, in the way they got there, exactly what will collapse under exam pressure.

What the hour actually looks like

Roughly: ten minutes of diagnostic, twenty-five on the single biggest thing it turned up, fifteen practising that unaided while the tutor watches and stays quiet, and five agreeing precisely what to do before next week. Not a chapter, not revise this topic, but ten questions of one specific type, because that is the only way to tell next week whether the thing we fixed stayed fixed.

The alternative is worth naming plainly. A lesson in which the tutor talks for an hour because the student had nothing to ask is not teaching, it is company, and it is the most common way tutoring quietly stops working while everyone remains satisfied with it.