How to Encourage Elementary School Students to Utilize Free Tutoring

Online tutoring is a transformative resource that has the potential to support deeper learning for many elementary students. Not only that, but it's a free resource accessible to all students. However, it can be difficult to encourage elementary school students to utilize free tutoring.

As you start your promotional campaign, parents should be your primary audience. However, you may also want to use strategies geared toward increasing interest on the part of your elementary school students.

Are you curious to learn how to encourage elementary school students to make full use of their free tutoring options? Take a look at these essential strategies.

Incorporate online tutoring into your curriculum

Implementing online tutoring as part of your students' homework is a great way to encourage elementary school students to adopt those services.

You might, for example, encourage students to complete a certain amount of sessions within a set amount of time—one to three sessions per week or five to ten sessions per month, depending on students' needs. Consider how much tutoring help students really need as you determine how many sessions to require in your classes.

Devise strategies that will allow you to reward students for successfully completing their tutoring sessions. For example, students might:

• Get a free homework pass for completing a set number of tutoring sessions
• Be rewarded with extra recess time
• Aim to reach a class-wide goal that will allow them to have a party or special snack one day during class

Raise awareness during class time

Take the time to talk about Pear Deck Tutor (formerly TutorMe) during your instruction time. For example, educators might start providing more information about specific types of available tutoring.

 Alternatively, they might encourage struggling students to take advantage of Pear Deck Tutor to help improve their scores and deepen their understanding of specific concepts.

When online tutoring is a regular part of classroom discussion, you may find that students are more likely to take advantage of it.

During these chats, you may want to offer more information about the features and benefits of Pear Deck Tutor in a way that's easily digestible. This can help increase the odds that they will take advantage of your tutoring program.

Finally, consider giving a live tutorial on how to use TutorMe. By going over the features and tools on the platform, you can make it easier for students to jump straight in once they're home and need to start those tutoring sessions.

Craft fliers or posters to promote the online tutoring services

Fliers and posters are a great channel for communicating information to younger students.

They're highly visual, so they're more likely to grab elementary students' attention. They're concise, with just a few notable pieces of information per flier, which means students are more likely to absorb that information. Finally, they're easy to produce and distribute throughout the school.

When you share information about your online tutoring platform, you're effectively "marketing" it to students and parents as a platform that will benefit them. In most cases, people need multiple touchpoints before they decide to take advantage of a new service or product.

Online tutoring is no different! With fliers posted throughout the school, students will receive those touchpoints on a daily basis. Your online tutoring platform will become a regular part of their school day (and something they think of immediately when they need to improve their understanding of or performance in a specific subject).

Consider where students gather most often. You may want to put posters and fliers in the gym, where students line up for the cafeteria, or in the library. Also, post your fliers in the hallways so that students will view them on a regular basis.

When you partner with Pear Deck Tutor, you'll get customizable templates for your posters and fliers to help drive student adoption.  

Use LMS homepage messaging to spread the word

Elementary students who learn remotely spend a lot of time in their LMS. That makes it a great channel to inform them about Pear Deck Tutor! You can:

• Link directly to Pear Deck Tutor from your learning management platform
• Include online tutoring sessions as a regular part of student assignments or "extra work" options
• Provide information about Pear Deck Tutor in your classroom assignments and updates

Reach parents via email, text, and parent-teacher conferences

Parents spend a lot of time on their phones, making it the perfect vehicle to send out essential information about your Pear Deck Tutor program.

Around 90% of people will read a text message within the first three minutes of receiving it. Text messages have a higher open rate than almost any other marketing form, which puts you in a position to reach parents more effectively when you use that platform.

Also, include information about your online tutoring efforts in parent newsletters. Consider sending out the information as a separate email, especially if you notice that adoption rates are low.

Finally, make sure that you mention Pear Deck Tutor in your parent-teacher conferences. Students struggling to meet their academic goals will benefit heavily from an online tutoring platform, which may help bring them up to grade level.

Likewise, students who excel may enjoy an online tutoring platform that offers them a more individualized learning experience. This can help them go above their grade-level studies and provide them with more personalized learning opportunities.

Are your elementary school students leveraging your online tutoring program?

Ensuring high student adoption of your online tutoring platform can be difficult. At first, many parents may not realize just how beneficial it can be. However, by marketing to students and parents alike, from fliers in the halls to emails and texts to parents, you will find it much easier to get your students to start really benefiting from those programs.

Pear Deck Tutor offers comprehensive support to all its partners to help ensure that their program succeeds, which includes pairing them with a dedicated Customer Success Manager who will work with them to help drive student adoption.

Do you want to see what it'd look like to empower your elementary school students with 1:1 online tutoring? Learn more about teaming up with Pear Deck Tutor to maximize student success!