Refute Opposing Views
In addition to offering evidence to support your own position, you'll need to anticipate and refute potential opposing views. To refute an idea is to prove that idea false. Why is it important to refute opposing views in your essays? You might have enough strong points in the case you're already building without discussing what skeptical readers who oppose your arguments might say.
But if you don't address potential opposing views, you've left your argument open to very easy criticism without defending your ideas. So you'll need to conduct research - or, if you're working on a timed essay exam, do some brainstorming - to come up with what the opposing side's strongest arguments would be.
For our example essay about student tutoring, an opposing view might be that the school should offer a tutoring center staffed by professional tutors and teachers rather than students, so that the people who come to the center seeking help can be assured that they'll be receiving reliable and accurate information.
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Outline your major points and how you will address opposing views in the essay.
You might refute this point by countering that the school does not have the funds to hire professional tutors and that your school is home to more than enough students who could very effectively work as tutors and who might be motivated to perform their duties well through a system that awards course credits for their work.
Organize Your Points
So we know that you'll need to identify major argumentative points in support of your thesis, that you'll need to present evidence in support of those points, and that you'll need to refute opposing ideas. Naturally, you'll need to figure out where to put all of that stuff.
As is the case with any paper, it's very useful to sketch out an outline of the major points that you'll make so that you can more effectively structure your paper. Doing this will help you determine the best ways to arrange your points with respect to the opposing views that you'll raise and refute.
Consider what your strongest points are. Do your strengths lie in the major argumentative points that you sketched out in support of your thesis? Is your most effective point one that comes from refuting an opposing view? It's up to you to decide whether to open the body of your essay with what you deem to be your strongest point or to close with your strongest point. Each strategy can be effective in its own way.
Similarly, you might group all of your points that you make refuting opposing views together at the start of the body of your paper or at the end of the body. Or you might decide to structure the paragraphs in your argument so that you address opposing views when they naturally arise.
For example, after you devote a paragraph to your major argumentative point that Students are often able to relate to and understand their peers' explanations of academic concepts, you might devote a paragraph to refuting the opposing view that professional tutors would be preferable by underscoring the availability of qualified and effective student tutors. Remember that you'll need to provide evidence in support of your point, perhaps in the form of details about other schools that have student-staffed tutoring services that have proven successful.