Meet the experts behind Third Space Learning: Candida Crawford [1]

Hi, my name is Jeremy. I'm part of the team here that works directly with schools. But today I want to meet one of the experts who are behind Third Space Learning. So hi, Candida.

Hi.

Why don't you start by telling us a little bit about what you do here at Third Space?

Okay. So I'm part of the teaching and learning team and we look at tutor training and tutor development as well as curriculum design, because these work hand in hand, one to one. Tutoring is what we do. So good tutoring is at the heart of what we do. We take maths specialists and we train them in pedagogy how to teach maths in an effective way to primary school children. We focus on the cognitive side, so misconceptions and how best to introduce concepts and things like that. But we also focus on the softer skills. So we're looking at how to use good empathy or build confidence or improve growth mindset.

Candida, do you have any insights that you can share with teachers, perhaps those who have pupils who are struggling with maths?

Well, I think there's a danger of focusing too much on outcome, you know, just on the cognitive gains rather than focusing in parallel on the softer skills and the process of how to get there. And I think at Third Space we train our tutors to focus on both sides. So I'd say that it's more looking at the holistic view and trying to use that to develop a pupil's understanding in maths.

What is your process for developing the tutors?

So what we do is we give a session evaluation to each tutor every single week. So we randomly pick a session so that they're not aware of it and we give them face to face feedback on how to improve and areas that they should pay attention to. This means that they're getting a lot of feedback on a continuous basis, a lot more than perhaps a regular teacher does. Then we also watching these videos to try and understand where common misconceptions are with pupils or possible ways that we can improve our lessons. We take all of this information and we share it with our tutors on a weekly basis using videos or an online learning platform.

Candida, what excites you about the work that you're doing at Third Space Learning?

So at the moment I am responsible for our SAT program and it's really exciting to see so many tutors teach the same lesson again and gain valuable insights from this, taking that, harnessing it and being able to use that for our teacher training and development. So I'm really proud of our SATS program that we've been able to develop. And I think that our pupils are definitely growing in confidence and will be super prepared for their SATs.

So, Candida, how would you compare being at the coalface in the classroom versus working at Thirdspace Learning?

Yeah, so I was a teacher for 10 years and I really enjoyed that personal contact that I had with pupils at Third Space. It's different. I have indirect contact with the pupils, but, you know, direct contact with the tutors. And I have an influence on the pupil through this way. But it's now with thousands of pupils per week. So I'd say that I do miss the classroom, but the impact is great.

Candida, what's next for helping our tutors develop an rcpd?

So we have a lot of different inputs, so we do a session evaluation. A tutor can improve through that feedback. We have our pupil feedback because they give feedback at the end of each session. So they've got a lot of ways of how to improve. But we're really excited about using technology to perhaps start giving real time feedback to tutors while they're teaching a session. If you want to download free resources or find out more about our one to one interventions, just visit thirdspacelearning.com.