This post is the first in a series designed to help parents understand when tutoring might be needed, how to find a good tutor for your child, and how to evaluate whether the tutoring process is working.

When I was a teacher and adviser to high school students, parents would often ask me if I thought their son or daughter needed a tutor.   Now that I’m a tutor, I am reflecting on these conversations, wondering whether I should have been more proactive about recommending tutoring to the parents of struggling students.  Part of my hesitancy to advise tutoring stemmed from the fact that I—like many teachers, I suspect—knew very little about the types of tutoring available and how to evaluate them as potential aids to the learning process.  Here’s what I would discuss with parents inquiring about tutoring in light of what I’ve learned over our first few months in the tutoring business (with the caveats that I’m still learning and the tutoring industry continues to grow and change):

1. What do you, as a family, hope to gain from enrolling your child in tutoring? This is a critical question to answer before investigating specific tutoring firms.  Most tutoring companies have specialties, as I will discuss in a future post, and knowing exactly what you are looking for will save you time, effort, frustration, and perhaps even money, in the long run.  Most parents first think about tutoring when a child brings home a series of graded assignments receiving poor marks.  Some parents detect a pattern of unusual behavior or disengagement from school that precedes poor marks.  In either case, these unusual behaviors or poor marks should be discussed as dispassionately as possible with both the student and his or her teachers.

   Parents might ask the student what he or she thinks led to the grades in question.  Parents should also ask how school is going more generally to elicit the student’s ideas about what is going well and what is not, and about what the student perceives to be his or her own strengths and weaknesses as a learner.  You might also find out a lot just from asking your child to show you his or her backpack, work samples, class notes, agenda book, etc.

   With this information from the student in hand, a conversation with the students’ teachers can be an additional opportunity to determine the exact nature of the child’s roadblocks to learning.  Even if the child is only having trouble in one class, it is a good idea to initiate a conversation with each teacher concerning the following:  How is your child doing in class in terms of both grades and effort/participation?  What does the teacher see as your child’s academic strengths and weaknesses?  What actions does the teacher recommend that the student take to improve or sustain his or her ability to learn in the class?  If the student has an IEP or 504 plan, or is otherwise receiving services from his or her school’s Special Education or learning assistance/support center, directing these same questions to your child’s liaison in that department is also crucial.

   From these conversations and observations, patterns often emerge.  For some students, problems in several classes really come down to reading difficulties or organizational problems.  For others, a particular subject may be so challenging that extra support outside of class is needed.  For still other students, a non-academic problem may be impacting academic performance, and treatment for this issue may need to be sought from a doctor, therapist, or other source before the student will be able to focus optimally on learning.

   In any case, use your insight about your child’s overall learning goals and the information gleaned from the conversations with your child and his or her teachers to develop an action plan to help your child achieve his or her objectives.  Perhaps your child’s teachers will provide some strategies you can try at home with your child to address the problem.  In that case, your action plan might be to try these for a month and then to re-evaluate the situation.  The action plan may be quite different if, in the course of investigating the child’s learning issues, several teachers cite the need for improvement in a specific area, such as reading comprehension.  In this case, your action plan might involve investigating area tutors who provide reading remediation and beginning tutoring once a match is made between student and instructor.  The more you know about your child’s learning goals, style, and history, the easier it will be to make a beneficial match between your child and a tutor.

Next time: Now that you know what your child needs, how do you find a great tutor?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 24th, 2010 at 4:32 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.