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Published
June 18, 2022

How to Make the Most of Your School's Tutoring Program

Your school's tutoring program is an excellent intervention to support your students' success, whether you're offering students additional guidance in areas where they may be struggling or more opportunities to explore subjects that may interest them.

In order to maximize the impact your tutoring program has on your students, these specific strategies can help improve overall student success rates and enable your students to excel.

1. Maintain a low student-tutor ratio

Studies show that a low student-tutor ratio is one of the most effective ways to improve tutoring outcomes. Students benefit most from true 1:1 tutoring—it delivers a distraction-free learning environment where students receive undivided attention from a tutor for more efficient collaboration.

When you increase your student-tutor ratio, you may run into many of the same problems you face in the classroom—most notably, that students in large groups typically will not learn the same way or at the same rate.

A 1:1 or 1:2 student-tutor ratio, on the other hand, can help tutors focus more on the needs of each individual student, particularly at the elementary school level.

If you want to maximize the positive impact of tutoring programs for your school, offer small group tutoring when possible for in-person support and 1:1 sessions for online tutoring.

2. Offer flexible scheduling

Students may need academic support at different times of the day based on their own schedules, including the activities they participate in outside of school and their typical working hours.

Consider that around 42% of school-aged children participate in sports, 30% take extra lessons of some type, 28% are in an extracurricular club, and as many as 9% of students participate in all three.

That can mean a lot of after school hours spent in other activities—and it means that in order to make tutoring accessible to every student, it needs to be available during flexible hours.

If possible, extend support beyond office hours for your students. Online tutoring or tele-tutoring can help make tutoring more accessible for busy students who may have a full plate.

3. Deliver support in high-demand subjects

An effective K-12 school tutoring program offers support in all areas and subjects.

Not only do you want to focus on core disciplines like language arts and math, you may wish to provide help with languages, computer science, engineering, and humanities classes.

You may also consider offering students access to expert test prep or tutoring in professional subjects for high school students.

Pay attention to the areas where your students really need support, then make sure you have a program that can cater to the unique needs of your students.

For example, if you have a high school program with many professional-track students, it's critical to ensure that those students have access to support in those critical subject areas, not just their core academic subjects.

Connecting with professionals who understand the industry can prove essential to students' ability to pass those classes and thrive in their future career fields.

4. Provide high-dosage tutoring

High-dosage tutoring offers readily-accessible, high-volume tutoring sessions. In high-dosage tutoring, students will meet with tutors for approximately 50 hours over the course of the semester, or around three times per week.

During those sessions, they will receive 1:1 support geared toward helping to fill in learning gaps, accelerate learning, and focus on specific, unique needs of each student.

Students who go through high-dosage tutoring sessions during a semester have much better outcomes than those who try other tutoring options.

Make sure your program has the bandwidth to provide high-dosage tutoring to the students in your school who are most in need of support. It may mean having a specific number of tutors available to help and a scalable program that can meet the changing support needs of your students.

5. Integrate online tutoring into your student support program

An online tutoring solution is a great way to give students access to the tools they need to succeed. TutorMe is a proven intervention that supplements existing tutoring programs (and also makes an ideal standalone support solution) to help your students excel.

With TutorMe incorporated into your program, you'll bolster your student support services with flexible, on-demand help wherever and whenever students need it, filling in support gaps in your in-person or tele-tutoring hours.

Furthermore, TutorMe offers genuine 1:1 tutoring where students get the undivided attention of a verified expert dedicated to helping them succeed.

In addition, TutorMe provides expert support in all essential K-12 subjects, which means it can accommodate the diverse needs of every student.

To make integration as simple and stress-free as possible, TutorMe partners with the leading LMS providers and rostering solutions to provide full integration and enable seamless single sign-on.

Developing a successful student tutoring program is an ongoing process

Not only have student needs grown over the past couple of years due to COVID-related learning gaps and challenges, but more parents than ever are recognizing the importance of tutoring to improve student outcomes.

If you're trying to grow your school tutoring program to meet increased student demand, it's critical to provide low student-tutor ratios and access to high-dosage tutoring when needed.

TutorMe can supplement your existing student tutoring program or work as a standalone solution to fill those support gaps and increase student success.

Curious to learn more about how partnering with TutorMe can help you make the most out of your school's tutoring program? Let's connect!

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Rudy Hernandez

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