As tutoring has become more and more popular, and tutoring options and modalities more diverse, motivations for hiring tutors have changed. Increasingly tutoring may be seen as a way to “enrich” a student’s educational experience or help them excel at the highest levels – but that isn’t necessarily the same thing as improving the quality of his or her education, or an appropriate support for success in a class, on a high-stakes test or with learning in general.
Improving elders’ computer skills can reduce isolation and bring social contact, enjoyment and learning opportunities that enrich their lives and help older people feel more connected in the tumultuous modern world. We need more elder bloggers, more elders on Facebook, more elders Skyping, and so on.
Recently I’ve seen several surveys asking educators to rate their top iPad apps for teaching and tutoring. Following is a compendium of what these helpful bloggers found to be the most popular free apps out there for tutors.
Many college-bound students will be spending time this summer prepping for SAT or ACT exams, either with private tutors, in group settings or on their own. … With sympathy for their plight, I searched online for some low-cost ideas on how to make preparing for the SAT or ACT over the summer “fun” – or at least a little less boring.
If you’re an experienced educator interested in picking up summer tutoring work, here are five possibilities to consider.
An article this week in the New York Times highlights how the high-stakes, testing-driven competition for a top-rated education continues to intensify in the US – and how tutoring is deemed crucial to students’ success.
As you probably know, The College Board (creators of the SAT test) and ACT, Inc. (creators of the ACT test) both now have “benchmarks.” These benchmarks are reported to serve as predictors of college and career performance, based entirely on how students score on the tests.
High school students benefit significantly from college admissions counseling information and guidance – yet most don’t get much of it. According to the latest State of College Admission 2011 from the National Association for College Admission Counseling, “For many students, particularly those in public schools, college counseling is limited at best. Counselors are few in number, often have large student caseloads and are limited in the amount of time they are able to dedicate to college counseling.”
Already thirty-seven states plus the District of Columbia have said that they intend to apply for an SES waiver between now and mid-February 2012. If granted, the waivers would free districts in these states from setting aside hundreds of millions of dollars each year for after-school tutoring targeting the lowest-performing students. This sweeping change would effectively end SES, which has already been eliminated from the Senate’s version of the updated NCLB legislation.
One of the oldest and most powerful teaching techniques is simply to guide the learner by asking directed questions. This basic tutoring approach is sometimes referred to as the Socratic Method or the “inquiry method.”
