Tutoring Toolkit: Tools to Strengthen Your Tutoring Program

YOUTH RESOURCE

Tutoring Toolkit: Tools to Strengthen Your Tutoring Program

This toolkit features informative articles, program overviews, printable forms and resource lists to help the nonprofit tutoring program director recruit, train, inform and equip tutors.

Project Development Tools

These brief lists suggest possible topics for discussion in tutoring interviews and training sessions. Use these suggestions directly in your interviews and training plan, or as a basis for developing your own creative formats.

1. Possible Interview Questions for Volunteer Tutors
This tool can help you and potential tutors evaluate whether tutoring is an area in which the volunteer can use his gifts, abilities and experiences.

2. Potential Training Topics for Volunteer Tutors
Good tutor training is essential to the success of your program. This tool will assist you to determine which topics should be addressed in training sessions for volunteers.

3. Quality Standards for After School Programs (NEW)

The National After School Association has convened hundreds of practitioners and educators and defined 36 quality standards for after school programs. This document lists them in brief; a much more detailed version of the standards is available in book form from the Association.

Project Implementation Tools

The following articles, helpful tips, and tutoring program and manual overviews will help you identify program needs, build and improve your program, and work effectively with your program’s volunteer tutors.

1. Articles and Power Point Presentations

Overcoming Differences in Tutoring Relationships: Common Concerns and Solutions
Tutoring involves working closely with someone whose background or experiences may be vastly different from your own. Here, FASTEN lists six common concerns about differences in tutoring relationships, and presents solutions to overcoming those concerns.
Relationship Building Tips for Tutors and Tutees
Here are 6 quick, practical tips for building a productive, trusting tutoring relationship.
· Promising Practices: Tutoring Recruitment, Training, & Support (NEW)

This power point by Dr. Amy Sherman of FASTEN summarizes recommendations on what works.

· Hands-On Activities for Tutees (NEW)

This list offers suggestions for games/activities for tutors to complete with their tutees, to build reading, math, and writing skills.

2. Helpful tips

These resources offer ready-to-use information related to such topics as intellectual development in children, suggested student activities and reading lists, and ways to show appreciation to volunteer tutors.

Recommended Books for After-School Programs, Grades K-3
Books are an important part of any tutoring program. This tool provides a listing of books that are especially appropriate for black and Latino children in grades kindergarten through three.
Recommended Books for After-School Programs, Grades 4-5
This tool provides a listing of books that may be used in tutoring black and Latino children in grades four and five.
Twenty-Five Ways to Get the Most Out of Reading
Supplemental activities will enhance a reading program and engage the interest of students. These suggested activities may be used to help students master reading skills.
Video on Reading Aloud to Kids
This brief video, produced by The National Partnership for Quality Afterschool Learning, would be great for use in a tutor training seminar. It shows a professional teacher reading aloud to her elementary school class and includes multiple helpful tips.
What Are We Trying to Achieve?: Bloom's Six Levels of Intellectual Skill Building
This tool can help teachers, tutors and child development professionals to evaluate students’ intellectual abilities and to plan activities aimed at helping children to progress through each level of intellectual skill building.
Volunteer Recognition Tips
Volunteers should be recognized for the selfless hours they spend working with struggling students. These ideas can help you to let your volunteers know how much they are appreciated.
The Tutor Newsletter
A great resource for practical information for tutors and tutoring program directors, packed with relevant examples and covering issues such as help with homework, reading with struggling adolescents, and building partnerships with parents and teachers.
· Ways for Parents to Be Involved (NEW)

This tip sheet lists a wide variety of ways for parents to get engaged in your school-based or after school program.

3. Manuals

Field Goals, a manual for tutors
The Field Goals manual provides a collection of goals and objectives that will help tutors establish effective tutoring plans for students. Read this article to find out more.

4. Model Programs and Curricula

Whether your youth tutoring program has been two months or twenty years in practice, you can gain insight and inspiration for your tutoring plan through these best-practice models of youth tutoring programs.

YET Center programs
YET (Youth Education for Tomorrow) Centers, part of the Community-Serving Ministries program of Public/Private Ventures, provide daily, non-religious literacy instruction to children in the Philadelphia area. Learn more about YET Centers in this instructive overview.
Curriculum Guide from the Children's Defense Fund
This after-school reading program is an especially helpful model for those interested in reaching out to black and Latino children. Read this article for more information about the curriculum, its contents and its philosophy.
S.P.A.R.K. Peer Tutoring Project
The S.P.A.R.K. peer tutoring program stems from a similar successful program based in Wisconsin. This article describes the program and how to use the corresponding resources to train high school-age peer tutors.

Project Evaluation Tools

Print these convenient downloadable forms and use them to gather useful feedback from volunteer tutors, the students they tutor, and the tutees’ parents.

1. Sample Volunteer Tutor Year-End Self-Evaluation
Evaluation is an important part of any tutoring program to assess the progress of the program and its participants. You can distribute this form to help tutors assess their own performance and to determine how tutors feel about their work.
Download PDF

2.     Sample Tutee Year-End Self-Evaluation
This tool will help you to ascertain students’ own perceptions of how they are doing in a tutoring program.
Download PDF

3.      Sample Parent Evaluation
Tutors can use this form to obtain input from parents about the impact of a current tutoring program on their children’s academic performance, and about any helpful ideas they may have that can enhance the tutors' success with their children.
Download PDF

4.    Sample Tutor Evaluation of Tutee
This tool will enable tutors to review their work with students and provide feedback to tutoring program leaders regarding the students’ progress.

5. Self-Assessment for Parents: How Well Do You Support Your Child’s Learning? (NEW)

This checklist from the National Coalition for African American Parent Involvement in Education will help parents identify many ways they can be supporting their child’s learning.

Additional resources

Need more help with your tutoring program? These recommended books, manuals and Web sites will help you find the information you’re looking for.

Print resources

After-School Curriculum Guide, published by Children’s Defense Fund
Field Goals, published by the National Center for Training and Educational Assistance (NCTEA)
Growing A Volunteer Tutor Program: Engaging Communities to Support Schools, published by Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory
KidREACH After-School Academic Mentoring Manual, published by World Vision
S.P.A.R.K. Peer Tutoring Handbook and Training Manual, published by Empowering Youth, Inc.
Tutoring: Learning by Helping, by Elizabeth Sabrinsky Foster
Tutoring Matters, by Jerome Rabow, Tiffani Chin and Nima Rahimian