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Why incorporate routine relationship-building activities into tutoring?

Strong relationships are fundamental to students' success with tutoring. The more students feel safe, supported, and that they have a personal connection with their tutor, the more impactful the sessions will be. At the outset, relationship-building activities help tutors get to know their students and create a safe, positive learning environment. Building them into routine tutoring sessions helps tutors keep their knowledge of students alive and current.

Why does building relationships with students matter?

We learn best from people who care about us. Students who feel a connection with their tutor are more likely to engage in learning, ask questions, build motivation, and achieve better academic outcomes. Strong tutor-student relationships built on a foundation of shared understanding and trust create the conditions for all students to take the risks necessary to make dramatic academic gains.

Implementation Checklist

• Tutors take an asset based approach and are motivating in all interactions with students.
• Tutors reinforce a growth mindset whenever students struggle or make mistakes.
• If Tutor Consistency is Consistent: Tutors are matched to students using intentional and systematic methods. 
• If Tutor Consistency is Consistent: Tutors get to know their student using specific strategies and activities. 
• If Tutor Consistency is Inconsistent: The program uses centr

What is a Virtual Tutoring Platform? 

A virtual tutoring platform is an online conferencing system that facilitates virtual tutoring.

Why does small-group facilitation matter?

If your Student-Tutor Ratio is Small Groups instead of one-to-one, your tutors will need skills to establish group norms and manage behavior during sessions. In addition to the facilitation moves listed in the Facilitation Moves Checklist, small-group facilitation requires additional planning and tools to foster a positive, productive learning environment for a group.

Why does facilitation matter?

Facilitation is what keeps a student engaged and on-task throughout a tutoring session. Effective facilitation requires thorough planning: not just around what concepts and skills to work on, but also around the routines, directions, and logistics of the tutoring session itself. Time the tutor spends thinking these things through ahead of time maximizes the time the student spends actually learning during the session, rather than getting situated or resolving confusions.

Implementation Checklist

• Tutors reinforce the academic language and procedures of the classroom and hold students accountable for doing the same.
• Tutors appropriately use open-ended questioning to ensure students are articulating their understanding of the content.
• Tutors facilitate content clearly, correctly, and at an appropriate pace.
• Students engage with content using a variety of learning tools that promote productive struggle given their unique needs.
• Students experience multi

Why establish a consistent tutoring session structure?

When students know what to expect, they can better internalize what is expected of them. If each session has a consistent rhythm, students will feel safer and more engaged, and tutors will deliver more consistent and effective sessions. Instead of spending prep time internalizing directions and pacing, they can focus on content.

Implementation Checklist

• Sessions have a consistent structure with space for relationship-building, independent practice time, and formative assessment.

Implementation Tools

(Click on the links below or visit the pages on the lefthand navigation for more information.)

Example Tutoring Session Structure

Implementation Checklist

• Sessions have curricula with high quality materials that maintain rigor.
• Session content complements classroom materials to support student mastery.
• Sessions focus on targeted learning goals informed by grade level standards, assessment data, and family and school input. 
• Sessions have a consistent structure with space for relationship-building, independent practice time, and formative assessment.
• If Delivery Mode is Blended: High-quality research-based software

What is Blended Learning in a Tutoring Program? 

Blended learning is a delivery mode that combines live instruction with digital learning tools for independent practice. High-quality blended learning supplements live tutoring (either virtually or in person) with adaptive software, which modifies the presentation of material in response to student performance to support student learning.

Why should you create data-informed student groups?

If your Student-Tutor Ratio is Small Groups instead of one-on-one, the composition of these groups will influence session effectiveness. If students are grouped haphazardly, without regard for their academic strengths and struggles, then tutors will find it much more challenging to meet the individual needs of every student in a group.

What is Accessibility?

Students all learn in different ways: some of these differences are obvious, while others are more subtle. However, this seemingly simple truth is surprisingly difficult to internalize in practice. Most learning experiences are designed with only one kind of learning in mind, and thus optimized for only one kind of learner.

Why should tutors personalize their tutoring sessions?

The most effective sessions are personalized to meet an individual student’s needs. Student productivity and growth will increase if the tutor can identify the missing or incomplete skills that are holding a student back and focus on those specific skills. Identifying and addressing these skill gaps requires tutors to use both quantitative and qualitative data to shape the content they include and the approach they use during sessions.

What is a Landscape Analysis?

A Landscape Analysis outlines the strengths, resources, and needs of a particular community. It provides a framework for designing a service and ensuring that it is embedded directly in the needs of the community.

Tutoring Curriculum Overview 

While tutoring programs vary greatly in the content that is focused on during sessions, tutors should have a standards-aligned, rigorous, and grade-level appropriate curriculum to use during sessions. Having an established curriculum for tutors to follow ensures that tutors’ planning time is spent optimizing implementation and building deep content knowledge, not creating tutoring session plans.

Overview

Below, you will find two protocols for reviewing student academic data, one for a frequent post-session review and one for any data collected on an interim or infrequent basis. These protocols follow the same What/So What/Now What format as the Standard Data Review Protocol, but they are tailored with tutor-specific questions to guide data analysis.

Why should you establish a standardized process for Data Review? 

Standardizing a Data Review process helps set a clear expectation that the end product of Data Review is not knowledge, but action. Any Data Review Protocol should ensure that raw data is converted into a clear and digestible format before the reflection process so that reviewers can focus their energies on reflecting on the data, rather than synthesizing the data.

What do we mean by Data Review? 

Data Review is the process of collecting data, reflecting on it, and distilling it into actionable insights. This process is how you can turn data into knowledge and knowledge into action. Data Review requires going "below the surface" to find root causes for your results (both positive and negative) and planning actionable changes to continue improving your program.

Click Here to go to the Accelerator-Designed Tutoring Survey Instruments

What is a Performance Measurement Plan?  

A Performance Management Plan outlines how to assess a program’s progress towards making the desired Impact defined in its Logic Model, complete with key benchmarks to hit by specific dates. It is a reusable, consistent roadmap for finding rigorous answers to questions like “Are we on track?” or “What are we doing well?” or “How can we improve?” 

Implementation Checklist

• Identify who is responsible for reviewing each type of data.
• Create and routinely use protocols for reviewing data and distilling insights to inform decisions.
• Review disaggregated data to ensure equity of services.
• Set up processes for communicating data (and the insights distilled from it) to relevant stakeholders.
• Make informed decisions and take action based on data, resulting in continuous improvements.
• Establish standards for effective imp

Purpose

Use these ten multiple-choice questions to design your tutoring program’s model dimensions. Model Dimensions are the specific design choices a new tutoring program makes at the outset. Each choice you make should have a clear rationale supported by your Landscape Analysis. Below we describe each of the Model Dimensions and outline a set of considerations for each dimension. 

1. How are you targeting your tutoring, and what is your articulation for why tutoring is needed?

What is a Landscape Analysis?

A Landscape Analysis outlines the strengths, resources, and needs of a particular community. It provides a framework for designing a service and ensuring that it is embedded directly in the needs of the community.

What is a Logic Model?

A Logic Model is a road map for thinking through how to create a desired change or outcome. Creating such a model requires a top-level articulation of the inputs and actions required for a program to produce results, and an adherence to a consistent internal logic regarding how the design of a program relates to its goals. For any tutoring program, a Logic Model should explain how the model itself, the supports, and the stakeholders will interact to produce the results that you aim to achieve for students.