Toolkit for Tutoring Programs

Purpose: Small-group tutoring requires tutors to develop additional skills to create group standards and oversee behavior. It requires more than just the facilitation moves from the Facilitation Moves Checklist. It also involves planning and leveraging tools that help create a supportive environment for group learning. Tutors can use this guidance to prepare for small-group tutoring sessions and apply teaching methods that create effective group interactions and academic involvement.

Purpose: Adequate tutoring preparation involves planning the learning concepts and skills alongside session routines and logistical details. Students benefit from more learning time when tutors prepare ahead because less time is spent settling in or clarifying misunderstandings. With this checklist, tutors can plan facilitation moves that lead to successful one-on-one tutoring sessions and support them to reflect on their practice.

Facilitation Moves Checklist: One-on-One Tutoring

Purpose: Culturally relevant and inclusive instruction requires an ongoing commitment to revisiting and reworking instructional practices and involves educators at all levels regularly evaluating their biases. This checklist is not exhaustive, but it is a helpful starting point for tutors to reflect on how seemingly small choices in their instructional practices can have an outsize impact on students’ lived experiences of tutoring sessions.

1. Get to Know Each Student Personally

Purpose: Cultivating a growth mindset in students is essential for enhancing their learning potential and resilience. To effectively integrate this approach into tutoring sessions, consider the following strategies. 

Purpose: A consistent session structure helps students understand what is expected of them and builds a sense of safety and engagement. Predictability allows tutors to focus more on instruction and less on pacing and directions, leading to more practical sessions.

Purpose: To strengthen student-tutor relationships and enhance tutoring effectiveness, this survey gathers student feedback on key areas such as respect, trust, motivation, confidence, and self-awareness. Tutors are expected to reflect on the results and make targeted adjustments to better support student growth and engagement. 
Note that #4 is reverse coded, with a rating of “5” indicating a negative response. 

Purpose: Strong relationships between students and tutors are grounded in five key pillars: Respect, Trust, Confidence, Motivation, and Self-Awareness. Use the pillars as foundational elements to create a positive, productive tutoring experience and emulate the examples of strong practice.

Purpose: To select the most effective student-tutor matching strategy for your program, this table provides a clear comparison of the benefits and drawbacks of various approaches. It supports informed decision-making by helping programs weigh trade-offs based on their specific goals, resources, and student needs.

Purpose: Use the supporting table to help move from observation to diagnosis to instructional response to ensure each session is focused, responsive, and impactful. 

Why Personalize Tutoring Sessions? 

Personalized tutoring is more effective because it targets the specific skill gaps holding students back. By using both quantitative and qualitative data, tutors can tailor content and strategies to better meet student needs—leading to greater engagement and academic growth.

What Data Should Tutors Use?

Purpose: Students' relative skill levels change over time, so grouping students based on skill involves regularly reassessing students' skill levels and re-grouping them accordingly. Use the following checklist as a guide for setting initial student groups. Depending on the length of the tutoring program, students may need to be re-grouped periodically. 

Why should you create data-informed student groups?