Purpose: The tips below demonstrate ways in which programs can boost attendance for tutoring, including incentivizing attendance through positive peer pressure and team-based competitive gamification.
- Strategically utilize the same flyer in a variety of ways. For example, create a flyer of the high-impact tutoring schedule to share as strategically-placed large posters, hard copies, and email blasts to parents, students, and teachers.
- Remind students about upcoming tutoring sessions. Send text reminders the day before (or during lunch for after-school tutoring). Collaborate with teachers to verbally remind students about tutoring throughout the day.
- Group students into “buddy-system” pairs or teams and reward each student for their teammates’ attendance. This encourages students to hold each other accountable for attending tutoring through positive peer pressure.
- Encourage friendly competition between teams of students. Include game-like activities in tutoring and create public leaderboards of attendance and performance. Keep records updated and reward teams that meet benchmarks.
- Experiment with holding sessions at different times of day or days of the week and track changes to attendance. This helps you identify when simple adjustments to the tutoring schedule could boost attendance dramatically.
- Consider adding tutoring as part of the requirement for course credit by requiring students to attend a certain number of sessions or makeup sessions.
- Make tutoring feel less like a classroom, provide snacks, arrange the room’s desks into pairs or small groups, and consider using non-classroom spaces in the school (such as lunchrooms or library spaces) to host tutoring.
- Consider small extrinsic rewards for attendance or engagement (e.g., small toys, pencils, earning points toward a free snack at the end of the program).
- For elementary/middle school: Pull up students’ class schedules, then send tutors to pick students up from their previous classes and walk them to the tutoring session. This creates time for rapport-building 1-1 conversations.
- For middle/high school: Offer tangible extrinsic benefits for tutoring attendance (e.g., “Come to tutoring and work on Topic X three times this week, and you can resubmit your assignment on Topic X for a higher grade.” or “Free entry to one school extracurricular event.”).