Congrats! If you are reading this you have likely made the decision to offer FEV's live, 1-to-1 virtual tutoring (or you are at least exploring what online tutoring would look like) at your school or district. Welcome to the FEV Tutor family! We are honored to have the opportunity to work with your students to help them progress on their academic journey.
This post is meant to provide some guidance from our Education Team for best practices on how to get the most out of our online tutoring programs. Follow these steps to help maximize the impact of your live, 1-to-1 tutoring initiative.
FEV Tutor Best Practices - Maximizing the Impact of Virtual Tutoring
As with any tutoring program, FEV Tutor's live, 1-to-1 tutoring is most effective when tutors can connect tutoring sessions with core class instruction. Outlined below are best practices for collaborating with FEV to create a tutoring program that is grounded in data and aligned with your school's core instructional strategies. These Best Practices have been written for FEV Tutor's virtual tutoring programs, but can be applied to any supplemental tutoring program.
1. Collaborative Program Design
The cornerstone of any successful tutoring program is the establishment of SMART Goals.
FEV Tutor provides a live tutoring service that is completely customized to meet the unique needs of each of our school and district partners. We do not believe there is a one-size-fits all solution. Our goal is to be a conduit to help your school to achieve existing district/school initiatives.
Before launching any program, we recommend that FEV’s Education Team travel on-site to meet with your key stakeholders for a Blueprint/Vision meeting. During this meeting we will learn more about your district and school to establish SMART Goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound) for the tutoring program. These SMART Goals can vary for each school, student cohort, or class enrolled in tutoring. Through backwards planning, our team will work with stakeholders to establish parameters for the program that both maximizes your investment and is specifically designed to accomplish each SMART Goal.
2. Driven by School/District Data
Our most successful programs are grounded in YOUR students' existing benchmark data.
The most direct and effective method for aligning 1-to-1 tutoring with core instructional strategies is to create informed targeted tutoring plans with existing district/school benchmark data. FEV Tutor can analyze a wide range of data points to create highly-targeted Personalized Tutoring Plans to differentiate tutoring for each student and align instruction to existing district/school initiatives. Example data points include: interim assessment scores, NWEA RIT scores, results from state exams, SAT/ACT scores, etc.
If no data is available, FEV can administer a standards aligned pre-test. Benchmark data is an important part of FEV's tutoring model, as it will serve as the baseline to assess the effectiveness of FEV's tutoring program. At the conclusion of the virtual tutoring program we encourage schools to share additional data points so that we can analyze the impact of the tutoring program on student growth (see #5 below).
3. Dynamic Academic Programming
Ongoing 2-way communication enables FEV to further improve and personalize instruction.
FEV Tutor offers schools a live service, which means our programs are adaptive and can be quickly altered on an ongoing basis. We communicate with stakeholders weekly to share reports containing formative assessment data, student feedback, attendance data, and more.
In our most successful programs, classroom teachers and administrators also share observations from the classroom, feedback on FEV reporting, and additional benchmark data points with our Education team. These data points allow us to continually mold tutoring to meet students’ needs. Our Education team is available by phone, email, web-meeting, and can even travel on-site to gather feedback from stakeholders to improve tutoring to achieve our established SMART goals.
It is important to remember, FEV Tutor is here as a resource for your teachers to extend their reach. The more feedback we receive, the closer our tutoring will connect to the students’ core learning environment. Many teachers will even share lesson plans, results from exams, specific worksheets, or topics they would like covered by FEV's tutors if they notice either a student falling behind or a class struggling with similar concepts on a weekly (or on an as-needed basis). The teacher is the main driver of the virtual tutoring program, FEV Tutor is here to make sure that 1-on-1 instruction is a direct extension of their reach.
4. Involve Parents & Families
Sharing student progress with families helps to further personalize tutoring.
Studies have shown that parent and family engagement in a child’s education is a greater predictor of academic success than wealth. It is for that reason FEV Tutor has a Family & Student Engagement team available 24/7 to involve parents and families in our virtual tutoring programs. In our most successful programs, schools leverage this team to foster communication directly with families to:
- Inform parents about the availability of virtual tutoring services
- Communicate the goals of the tutoring program
- Provide ongoing academic consultation
- Share weekly student progress reports
The Family & Student Engagement team plays an especially critical role for schools that offer tutoring outside of school day programming. This team calls and emails families directly to establish schedules for home-based tutoring, perform regular check-ins to make sure instruction is meeting the student's academic needs, provide real-time support for any technical issues, and follow-up immediately if a student stops attending tutoring sessions. This support team is available at no cost to our school and district partners. It is our goal to make sure that students are not only attending sessions, but that tutoring is truly personalized based on individual need.
5. Measure Tangible Academic Growth
Analyzing multiple measures allows you to evaluate student growth & program effectiveness.
All of FEV’s programs are backwards planned with one goal in mind: to show objective and measurable tangible student growth that can be directly correlated to the use of our tutoring programs.
At the conclusion of a virtual tutoring program, our Data Analysis team will analyze quantitative and qualitative data collected by FEV to measure student growth and program effectiveness. In our most successful programs, schools also share district/school benchmark data so our team can analyze key tutoring performance measures, formative assessment data, growth pre-test to post-test, interim assessment growth (or similar), and ultimately proficiency on state exams. Many school partners will share the data of a control group so that we can compare the effectiveness of our intervention through scientific analysis.
Our data analysis team can crunch the numbers for any data that is shared by your school or district. We believe it is important to ground our analysis in the same measures used by the school so that partners can easily review the impact of tutoring on student growth.
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Download a printable version of our best practices on how to set your online tutoring program up for success:
