ARTICLES AND REVIEWS:
No Child Left Behind Alert (November 15, 2007)
After-School Strategies To Revive Your Tutoring Program
Hint: Heavily detailed curriculum scripts can help boost success.
If your tutoring groups are too large, or if you're not using the right assessments, you may be inadvertently limiting your students' achievement. Get tutoring on the right track and help test scores climb with this expert advice.
1. Don't Cram Students Into One Session
If your tutoring program is not producing desired results, the first thing to adjust is the class size it's one of the most effective changes you can make.
Having fewer students means tutors can provide struggling learners with more individual attention, which is vital to children's success, says Edward Gordon, president of Chicago, IL-based Imperial Consulting Corporation and author of The Tutoring Revolution: Applying Research for Best Practices, Policy Implications, and Student Achievement.
How small? The limit for a tutoring group should be five children to one instructor, according to Gordon. "If you are doing 8-1, you are going to get mediocre results," he warns.
2. Avoid Scrimping On Tutoring Time
Make sure your tutoring regimen is intensive enough to spur long-lasting positive effects.
If your intensive help sessions last only 45 minutes each, students will progress slowly, if at all. Additionally, short sessions can be disruptive for working parents, who may decide they cannot juggle schedules and after-school care to participate.
What to do? Take a cue from the model that is working for many SES tutors embed tutoring into an after-school care program, suggests Bob Stonehill, chief program officer of after-school and extended learning time programs at Learning Point Associates and past Department of Education deputy director. These programs offer a two- to three-hour broad enrichment experience, of which tutoring is a structured block.
An adequate length of time for each session is important to tutoring's effectiveness, but so is the frequency and number of sessions. Consider scheduling at least 25 two-hour classes, spread out over three months, recommends Gordon.
3. Diagnose Trouble, Then Direct Tutoring
If you're wondering why tutoring programs like Sylvan and Kaplan are so successful, it's because they diagnose students' individual learning obstacles and monitor their progress frequently. Are you doing the same?
The first thing private companies do is baseline tests on new pupils, says Stonehill. Then, tutors focus their instruction on students' weakest skill areas. Some get even more technical by using computer programs that move forward only when a child has mastered the concept he is supposed to learn.
First step: Use diagnostic aids to help understand why each child doesnt grasp, or doesn't retain, content, says Gordon. You must accurately identify cognitive limitations in order to adapt your tutoring efforts to address individual students' learning differences.
Example: If you are using a diagnostic tool in conjunction with reading tutoring, you are more likely to pick up quickly on a learning difficulty such as dyslexia. With that information, you and your tutors can target instruction and skill building on that specific deficit, and see results sooner.
4. Use A Script Really!
One of the best tools you can use to diagnose strengths and weaknesses and gauge progress is a structured curriculum framework, or curriculum script.
"The more elaborate the script, the more powerful the result will probably be," states Gordon. In his own fieldwork, Gordon has used a 300-item script, which is basically a very specific, comprehensive list of the skills students need to be successful readers. Often, students begin tutoring already in possession of many of these skills it is where they are lacking that the tutoring should begin.
Important: Tutors need to be recording their pupils' skill levels at each tutoring session, emphasizes Gordon. Otherwise, you will lose data on what each child learned, and what each still doesn't know.
Bonus: Keeping precise progress records helps you keep an eye on program quality, and gives you useful information to share with both parents and classroom teachers, notes Gordon.
5. Select Tutors Who Want More Than Extra Pay
Staffing your tutoring program with qualified instructors is probably one of your biggest challenges. Find the right people by assessing if candidates have the right motivation and subject matter knowledge.
Myth: Don't be fooled by thinking that just anyone willing to tutor a child will do a good job. Instead, assign your most experienced, credentialed teachers who have a high level of personal motivation, counsels Gordon. Such highly trained tutors, who are teaching in their area of subject specialization, consistently produce the most promising tutoring results, he says.
Watch out: Avoid filling tutoring positions with staff teachers who are motivated by the extra pay, Gordon warns. Ask your teachers why they want to work after school after teaching all day. Try to confirm that their primary motivation is to participate in an individualized program to help struggling learners.
Smart idea: Also, look into options beyond credentialed teachers, an alternative that may even save you some money. With the right training and appropriate subject matter knowledge, high school and college students can make excellent tutors for the younger grades, Stonehill says.
However, no matter which tutors you chose, it's essential that they coordinate closely with their students' classroom teachers, Stonehill adds.
Sum up: Achieve strong tutoring results and potentially improved AYP by designing small tutoring groups led by knowledgeable instructors, using diagnostic tools and linking learning to the regular school day's curriculum, concludes Stonehill.
Resources:
Copyright 2007, Eli Research. Reproduced with permission. For subscription information, call (800) 874-9180.
"Does Your Child Need a Tutor," by Walecia Konrad, Good Housekeeping, October 2007. Ed Gordon's insight on some aspects of tutoring and his book, Tutor Quest, are cited in this article which is designed to help parents choose and evaluate different types of tutoring options.
"How to Improve Your School's Tutoring Program, MASA Leader, August 31, 2007, pages 8 & 9. In this Michigan Association of School Administrators' newsletter Ed Gordon provides 5 practical recommendations to educators on how to improve tutoring results.
Read: How to Improve Tutoring
"America Needs to Wise Up About the Need for Quality Tutoring," Chicago Sun-Times, November 29, 2006. Ed Gordon outlines three key building blocks for making tutoring effective: (1) Consumer education and some type of regulation to weed out fraud and ineffective tutoring, (2) Using research findings in designing and implementing tutoring programs, and (3) Providing professional training on tutoring in colleges and universities.
"In Tutoring, As in Teaching, Structured Programs Work Best," School Reform News, December 2006 The George Clowes review of The Tutoring Revolution highlights the "best practices" components in the chapter, "Has Tutoring Worked."
Read: Structured Programs
White Paper: The Incredible Shrinking Book: The Waning of Print Reading and Its Consequences for America, April 2006.Amplifying his recent keynote speech to the Ohio Association of Adult and Continuing Education (OAACE), Ed Gordon's White Paper provides futher evidence of the consequences of declining American literacy levels.
Read: The Incredible Shrinking Book
