Teaching versus Tutoring: The Difference & Why it Matters

In this episode, Rachel Cicioni clarifies the important distinctions between teaching and tutoring, emphasizing the professional expertise involved in teaching and how to accurately represent and price this work as a private practice teacher.

Chapters
00:00 Introduction: Why the Teaching vs Tutoring Conversation Matters
01:11 Defining the Roles: Teacher vs Tutor
02:08 The Responsibilities of a Teacher
02:59 Overlap and Differences in Planning and Assessment
03:40 The Hidden Work of Teachers: Pedagogy and Data Analysis
05:28 The Expertise Gap: Teacher vs Tutor Knowledge
06:44 Transitioning to Private Practice Teaching
07:51 Designing Learning Experiences and Pricing
09:02 The Importance of Accurate Professional Identity
09:46 Next Steps: Clarifying Your Offer and Value

Resources
Teaching vs. Tutoring: Why It's Time to Name and Own the Difference (Blog Post)

Teaching vs Tutoring PDF 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome to the Teacher to Entrepreneur Podcast. I'm your host, Rachel Siccioni, former classroom teacher turned entrepreneur and mentor to educators building their own unique teacher businesses. This is a space for teachers who are curious about alternatives to the classroom, exploring private practice and other multifaceted work, and for those who want to know what success can look like beyond the classroom. I'm glad you're here. Now let's get into today's conversation. That is not my intention, not even close. But it did make me pause and ask a better question. Why is this conversation so touchy? And more importantly, why does it matter so much? Here's what I believe. Teachers and tutors both play important roles in a student's learning journey. Both are valuable, both can be life-changing, but they are not the same. And when we blur the line between them, we unintentionally undervalue the work, training, and responsibility that goes into teaching. Now, here's where I think some of the confusion comes from. When people hear private teacher, their brain immediately goes to tutor. It's just what people know. And honestly, I even recommend tutoring as a starting point for your teaching business because it's easy to explain, it's familiar, it's accessible. But if we stop there, we never actually educate people on the difference between the two. And that's where the problem starts. So when someone asks me the difference between teaching and tutoring, because I say I'm a private teacher, I don't say I'm a tutor. Here's what I tell them. As a tutor, I'm helping students who already have a teacher. They already have a primary instructor. I'm not the one designing the curriculum. I'm not the one determining the learning outcomes or the goals, and I'm not the one responsible for the final assessment that goes on the student's transcript. What I'm doing as a tutor is triaging gaps in knowledge and skills. I'm helping students understand and apply the concepts that they have already been taught by their primary instructor. I'm reinforcing, I'm supporting, and that is important work. But it's not the same as teaching. Teaching is something else. As a teacher, I am the primary instructor. I design the curriculum. I build the scope and sequence. I introduce new concepts and skills. I scaffold those concepts based on prior knowledge. I assess the learning, I provide the feedback. I adjust my instruction in real time to how a student is responding. And I do do that also as a tutor to some degree, but not to the same degree that I do as a teacher. I'm not supporting someone else's classroom. I create the entire system for that learner. And as a private teacher, I am doing it for that specific learner or small group of learners instead of for a whole group of learners. Now there's overlap. Of course there's overlap. As a tutor, I do still plan. I still assess informally and sometimes even formally. And I still teach in the moment. But the level of responsibility, the level of planning, and the level of ownership is not the same. And pretending that it is does a disservice to both rules because both are important, but they're important in different ways and for different reasons. And here's the bigger issue. Here's why it's so important to me and I believe it should be to you as well. Most people don't know what teachers actually do. They know what it what they saw when they were a student in the classroom. They know what it felt like, and they remember sitting in a classroom. And they maybe have even gone to a parent-teacher conference if they happen to be a parent of a student. But they don't see everything that goes on behind the scenes. They don't see what happens before their child walked into the room or before they walked into the room as a student. And they don't see what came after in order to inform the next day's instruction. They don't see the planning, the data analysis, the differentiation, the scaffolding, the constant decision making. They don't have the professional knowledge of pedagogy, child development, and the neuroscience that we get as teachers. Most people don't even know what pedagogy means. I define it for my students when I tell them that I have a degree in pedagogy and in French that I double majored. I always have to tell them that pedagogy is the science of teaching and learning. Most people don't even know what that is. And so they don't know all of the invisible work and knowledge and expertise that we have to bring to our students in order to help them to learn and create and develop brand new skills and help their brains actually grow. So when teachers leave the classroom and call what they do tutoring, it creates a little bit of a disconnect because it doesn't accurately communicate everything that's going on. When they think tutoring, they're thinking about the high school student who tutored or the college student who tutored. And even as a high school and college student during undergrad, I tutored and I charged pretty well for it, too. But I didn't know barely even a fraction of what I know now as a teacher with a master's degree in education and 15 years of teaching experience to a broad range of students, thousands of students. It's like the difference between a physician and a physician's assistant. Both are trained professionals, both help people, both are important and valuable members of a whole system, but they're not interchangeable in every context. And we don't pretend that they are. And even I, just the same person who offers both teaching and tutoring. It's different what I offer them. Let me explain it this way. When I started my business, I didn't want there to be confusion. I didn't want to be seen at the same level as I was when I was tutoring in high school and in undergrad. Because at that point, like I said, I didn't have the skills, the knowledge and experience, expertise that I have now, but I was exceptionally good in my content area. And I had some really good instincts, which is why I decided to become a teacher in the first place. But I didn't want to be just seen as a homework helper, which is really what I mostly was when I was a high school student. And not because that work doesn't matter, but it didn't really reflect the depth of what I'm capable of doing now. And so I looked at other professions. I looked at therapists and doctors and occupational therapists and lawyers and financial planners, people who take their expertise and go into private practice. And I thought, why not teachers? We are educated professionals. Over 50% of teachers in America have a master's degree or higher. If they can go into private practice, then we can too. And that's where the private practice teacher model came from. So as a private practice teacher, I do a lot of the same things that I did in the classroom, minus the bureaucracy. I design the learning experience, I build the curriculum and the assessments, I teach live and provide asynchronous support. I track the growth, I communicate with families, I continue my own professional development, both as an educator and as a business person. The only difference is that I work for myself and I decide who I work with, what I charge, how I structure my time, and how I facilitate learning. And this is where pricing comes into play. Because teaching requires more from me before and after the lesson. I charge more for teaching than I do for tutoring. Tutoring might require a quick check-in with either the student or their primary instructor and some very minimal planning. I've been doing this for a long time. And so I have a lot of tools in my toolkit. I don't need to put a lot of time in the front end for planning. And there's very little to nothing left on the back end of tutoring. So I don't charge as much for tutoring. Teaching, however, requires a full design, assessment, feedback, and follow-through. And so the pricing reflects that difference in scope. But this isn't just about pricing, this is about professional identity. If we want teaching to be recognized as the highly skilled, highly educated profession that it is, then we need to start naming it correctly. We need to start explaining it clearly. We have to stop shrinking it into something that's more palatable. Because when we do that, we reinforce that the idea of teaching isn't worth much outside of schools or even inside schools for that matter. So here's my invitation. If you are doing the work of teaching, own it. Call it what it is. Speak to the full scope of what you do, not to inflate it, but to accurately represent it because words matter. And if you're not sure whether what you're doing falls under teaching or tutoring, I created a free resource well over a year ago. And I will ask Mary to link it down below for you to help you decide where on the spectrum what you're doing is teaching versus tutoring. But here's what I want to leave you with today. Understanding the difference between teaching and tutoring is step one. Step two, actually knowing what you're selling. Because most teachers, even the really good ones, are out here selling their time, homework help or support without realizing it. And that's exactly why they feel underpaid, overworked, and stuck, even as a self-employed teacher. So next week, I'm going to break that wide open. We're talking about what are you actually selling as a private practice teacher, why thinking hourly is keeping you small, and how to start positioning your work in a way that reflects the full value of what you do and what you have to offer. Because once you understand that shift, everything else, your pricing, your marketing, your confidence, the way you present yourself during your consultations, all of that starts to fall into place. Until then, I hope you have a great week. Thank you for listening. If today's episode resonated with you, please share it with a colleague or leave a review. This helps the conversation reach other teachers who may need it. You can learn more about what I do and how to work with me at theprivatepracticeteacher.org. Best wishes always.