Educator

The Critical Thinking Child

At the Critical Thinking Child (CTC), we provide tutoring and educational consulting for students, parents, and partners seeking to support children and young people in navigating academic success within our modern era of technology. We prepare students to engage in learning and think critically and deeply about our evolving world.

NOW! Programs

NOW! ProgramsⓇ is a provider of online, evidence-based literacy instruction designed to meet the diverse needs of K-12 students. For over a decade, we have delivered 1:1 and small-group instruction through our proprietary program, NOW! Foundations for Speech, Language, Reading, and SpellingⓇ, which is grounded in research funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). This research was rigorously vetted and ranks in the top 3% of the nation’s proposals for its proven impact on literacy development.

This Is a Critical Moment for High-Impact Tutoring. Don’t Give up on It

High-impact tutoring has the strongest evidence base of any approach for improving student learning, and contributes to increased engagement and attendance. As far as proven education solutions go, it’s a pretty darn good one, and has rightfully been a bipartisan priority since the pandemic. 

But federal pandemic relief money that helped fuel the expansion of such programs dried up in September, and recent research has sparked debates about the high-impact tutoring’s effectiveness when implemented at scale. This includes an evaluation of Metro Nashville Public Schools’ tutoring program that reported small gains for students and a meta-analysis of large high-impact tutoring programs that showed challenges in maintaining evidence-based practices

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What Happens When an AI Assistant Helps the Tutor, Instead of the Student

An AI-powered tutoring assistant increased human tutors’ capacity to help students through math problems and improved students’ performance in math, according to a Stanford University study.

The digital tool, Tutor CoPilot, was created by Stanford researchers to guide tutors, especially novices, in their interactions with students.

The study is the first randomized controlled trial to examine a human-AI partnership in live tutoring, according to the researchers. The study examines whether the tool is effective for improving tutors’ skills and students’ math learning.

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Proximity Learning

Proximity Learning has customizable tutoring options utilizing our Livestreamed (synchronous) certified teachers across all CORE subject areas and grade levels. Each learner will have the same tutor throughout the duration of the program. Tutors are intentionally trained on how to facilitate effective small group tutoring sessions, develop meaningful relationships with their learners, and progress monitor the academic growth per child. 

Team Tutor, LLC

Team Tutor is an educational tutoring firm that provides personalized tutoring, test prep and study skills programs to students in grades K-12 through an online and in-person tutoring model. Over the past 20 years we have collaborated with schools to provide tutoring services for students through our many school programs.

Bright Minds Inc.

Our program uses Huntington Learning Center academic programs, tailored for each student, to help students in grades 3-8 increase either their reading fluency and comprehension or their basic math skills. Teachers are assigned up to 4 students, who they then work daily as part of the master schedule at our partner schools. We have trained professionals come in from outside the school to achieve the teacher/student ratio required.

VIPTeacher U.S. Inc.

Live, Interactive Virtual Tutoring: BrightTreks offers live, real-time tutoring sessions with highly qualified educators. Our virtual environment allows for flexible scheduling while providing students with immediate feedback and support from their tutor. This dynamic approach ensures that students are actively engaged in every session, enabling deep learning and language acquisition.

Biden-Harris Administration Exceeds Goal of Recruiting 250,000 New Tutors, Mentors, and Student Success and Postsecondary Transition Coaches Across the Country

At a White House event today, Domestic Policy Advisor Neera Tanden, in coordination with the U.S. Department of Education (Department), AmeriCorps, and the Everyone Graduates Center at the Johns Hopkins University, will announce that the National Partnership for Student Success (NPSS) has exceeded President Biden’s call to recruit an additional 250,000 adults into high-impact student roles by summer 2025 to support academic success for all students. These roles range from tutors, mentors, student success coaches, postsecondary transition coaches, and wraparound/integrated student support coordinators. As of the end of the 2023-2024 school year, an additional 320,000 adults have stepped into these roles in schools, exceeding the President’s goal and doing so a year early. 

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Study: AI-Assisted Tutoring Boosts Students’ Math Skills

An AI-powered digital tutoring assistant designed by Stanford University researchers shows modest promise at improving students’ short-term performance in math, suggesting that the best use of artificial intelligence in virtual tutoring for now might be in supporting, not supplanting, human instructors.

The open-source tool, which researchers say other educators can recreate and integrate into their tutoring systems, made the human tutors slightly more effective. And the weakest tutors became nearly as effective as their more highly-rated peers, according to a study released Monday

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