Has anyone had good experiences using a tutor purely for study skills? Can anyone give a genuine recommendation for a London agency they felt were really good on humanities tutoring, not so much technique - I do trust the school to deal with that - but methods for effective revision for GCSE this summer?
Specifically, I need someone to spend a couple of sessions - not weekly up to GCSE - with DS trying to get him to understand how to use mind maps or a similar approach that uses pen and paper rather than his method of reading a computer screen and then talking to himself to "prove" that he's absorbed what he's read. I can only say that his results in History and RE to date suggest that his method isn't much cop. He has been in revision seminars at his school, but they don't seem to have had any effect, and I'm hoping (possibly vainly) that one-on-one, combined with the short period remaining to GCSE, might produce more effect.
I am getting nowhere in trying to encourage DS to change his method, it's causing too much friction, and I really don't want to ask the school.
(Maybe I'm wrong, but I think the benefits of a pen and paper are (a) it's more active than reading, and (b) if you've tested yourself by writing down bullet points or trigger words, you can SEE that you haven't remembered everything. If you're checking your recall orally, it's easy to miss (or ignore?) the fact that you didn't remember something in your list. Either way, he needs to try something new, because he absolutely tanked his RE mock and history wasn't much better.)
Thanks so much if anyone's got any comments at all. Any received gratefully!