When a student outgrows my plan

Tutors are rewarded for consistency, so we tend to defend our plans past their usefulness. I have kept a student on a scheme for six weeks longer than I should have, because progress was steady and steady felt like success.

There are three signs I now watch for. The student finishes tasks noticeably early and asks fewer questions. Their errors change character, from misunderstandings to slips. And they start explaining the material to me in their own words, unprompted, which means the concept is no longer where the work is.

A plan that is still perfect in month four was probably never ambitious.

When those appear, I stop adding difficulty of the same kind - more problems, bigger numbers - and change the task instead. Design an experiment to test this. Estimate this quantity with no data. Explain why the textbook's assumption is wrong for a real car.

This is also the moment to say out loud that the goal has moved. Adults and teenagers both work harder when a plan is renegotiated with them rather than quietly extended. Ten minutes rewriting the aim buys more than another problem set.

Sometimes the honest conclusion is that they are finished with me. Two of my Abitur students moved to a specialist mathematics tutor in their final term, and both scored better than they would have done with my loyalty.