Message from Alise: A Couple of Updates

Happy Thursday!

I know that each of you are enjoying your summer and are looking forward to the new tutoring year.

I just wanted to drop a few lines to let you know the following:

• I have released two more tutoring books to help you on your tutoring journey. The two titles are the following: 

(a) Dr. Holland-Johnson's Expanding Your Tutoring Business: The Blueprint for Protecting Your Learning Organization

(b) Dr. Holland-Johnson's Starting and Operating Your Online Tutoring Business: The Blueprint for Running an Online Learning Organization.

You learn more about them by clicking on this link.

• Last but not least, I wanted to let you know that new postings will be available in  mid-August so please do stay tuned.

Happy Tutoring!

Alise

Tutoring Trends in Education--What this means for you?

Education continuously grows as technology does. As people adapt to newer trends in the ever changing world of information, tutors have to follow suit. Students have lower attention spans now than they did before, so tutoring has been difficult to sustain student interest. As a result, it is important to realize the various tutoring trends in education that will provide you with better insight in managing your students properly. After all, they deserve the best treatment, so here's how you can definitely channel that treatment for their benefit.

Adapting Technology into the Tutoring Scenario

First and foremost, a tutor who embraces technology is one who embraces almost 90% of the youth today. This is an important trend that tutors must integrate with. Smartphones roam the market and tablets are "in" right now. Most students carry their tablets to school and use them for almost everything academically related, so blend in and make sure you channel such technology through your tutorials. You will find out that the outcome will be very productive and your students will catch on quite easily with your tutorial.

Maintaining the Short Attention Spans

Short attention spans are the bane of every tutor, especially in providing students with quality education. You can maintain your students' attention spans by keeping the lecture as interesting as possible. Use moving images and other vivid explanations to maintain your students' interest. It's all about charisma in action. Through this, you can ensure that your students learn from you as effectively as possible.

Expanding through Paperless Tutoring

Save paper. Channel your notes through digital media and keep things as paperless as possible. Some students may prefer the traditional pen-and-paper note taking, but make sure you limit the use of paper. Being environmental teaches more than just saving the trees, it teaches students to make the most of what resources they have available. It is important to inculcate such value for continuity to ensure the smooth development of tutoring services for future students.

Focusing on Clear Objectives

Students want to know the important details. The rest depends on their initiative to learn. Focus on clearing out what's necessary and establishing the important facts first. Based on their low attention span, they would want what matters to be out there. Your students will also retain more information when presented clearly and succinctly, so make sure you take note of this and enhance your teaching strategies.

Establishing Interactive Tutoring Schemes

Lastly, interaction is vital in maintaining liveliness in your tutorial session. Prepare activities that will help your student learn things through actions rather than monotonous lecturing. This adds spice to your tutorial sessions, which provides strong positive feedback to your students.

Educational trends must be taken into consideration when you deal out your tutoring services, so integrate and innovate. Your students deserve it. After all, as educational trends occur, tutors respond very effectively in enhancing that student-to-tutor relationship that is important in providing quality service and inculcating positive values for the betterment of student development.

10 Tutoring Apps for Reading

In tutoring, assigning reading material is a great way for students to expand their learning when they have free time. In that way, you strengthen the various perspectives of students and enhance their memory retention, vocabulary, and stock knowledge in the process. In this digital age, reading has taken another new wave of mediums that students are very much comfortable with. For instance, your student may have an iPad and he or she can download some of these ten recommended reading apps for his or her perusal. Of course, as a tutor, you should integrate with the latest trends, and this is one great venue to do so.

Zite - Your student can catch up with the latest news updates through his or her iPad. This is very useful for building stock knowledge and even letting your students search through the various reading options available by this app.

Flipboard - For that sleek, magazine-style reading sensation, your students can enjoy this app, for free. You can select various websites to gather news and then check the updates during your free time. This will help your students learn about the latest trends in whatever topic they wish.

Google Currents - Similar to your Google Reader, this reading app allows you to save content for reading offline. You can also embrace the easy-to-use interface for your reading convenience. It comes free so try it out.

iBooks  - You can easily download PDFs and other books from the store, especially text book material. This will definitely help your students out whenever they want to check against a reference without the bulk of carrying the book around all the time.

Science 360  - For students to build up their scientific knowledge, you can introduce this to them. This app continues vivid images of various scientific concepts to give your students a better understanding of the material.

Press Reader - Your automatic connection to the major newspapers, this app will give you the insights on what really matters. Let your students increase their awareness by immersing them into journalism.

Amazon Kindle - The Amazon store has a wide collection of books for your students to enjoy. Downloading this app opens them up to the various classical pieces and contemporary works of great authors.

PocketPhonics - For effective reading based on pronunciation, you can help students who have a hard time through this app. Various recorded sounds are available for your students to learn how they ought to be pronounced. There is a lite version available.

Reading for Kids - This app gives your student that push toward reading material that he or she wouldn't. There are creative ways that you can teach your student to read, and here are a 100 ways to do that.

Zinio - Zinio is your go-to app when you want that sleek, magazine style for your documents. Play around with this fun design available to ensure a dynamic appeal to your reading experience.

These apps are definitely tailored to providing your students with the right reading experience that they deserve. So recommend these and you will notice positive results.

Why Values are Important in Tutoring?

Tutoring is a career that is sensitive when it comes to values and principles. You won't be plainly teaching your students material for their enrichment, but you will be imparting values as well, and these things do not come lightly. You are going to be a mentor to a lot of kids, so make sure you understand that you have as much responsibility as a tutor because you are a moral compass, not to convert people, but to guide them the right way. As a result, values shouldn't be taken as something as trivial, but should be inculcated in the best way possible. Here are some pointers for you to reflect on.

Values are usually Engraved

The thing about values is that they are engraved in the minds of your students. Especially if you have the influence to redirect students' thoughts, you should remember that these values will be taken note of and even wholly embraced by your students. Always remember that they are there to learn, and whatever you introduce to them, they will listen. Focus on providing values of good study habits and effective learning to help them defeat their weaknesses. Most students need that extra push so exert extra effort to provide them with the necessary actions you want of them. Values help shape students, so be wary that they can be engraved and not forgotten, so choose what values to impart.

Values will be Practiced

Students you tutor have their priorities misplaced. When you provide them values, they will definitely practice them. So, ensure that these values are positive and developmental. If you inculcate the need to interact with their peers, your students will eventually catch on and implement this in their everyday lives. Putting values to practice is basically every tutor's dream, especially when they see their students being responsible in managing their time and school work. This makes values very much important for any tutor, because, as mentors, you will be giving them that insight and growth that they deserve.

Values make responsible Citizens

Most of all, values teach students proper ethics and conduct. If you report to the tutorial early and provide them with adequate information and interaction, your students will be more responsible when they, too, work later on. They will learn that punctuality matters and proper etiquette is necessary. These simple gestures will already shape how students view their tutors, so make sure you optimize your time and provide the necessary values to help your students, not only during their academic lives, but also for their work lives later on.

Values are very important in tutoring because they provide them with the necessary background and assets in handling situations more responsibly. Basically, it provides them with ethics that is necessary to enhance their conduct as citizens. Educate and inculcate these values to ensure that your students grow and learn about important life lessons, one step at a time. After all, as a tutor, you are more than just a person who shares knowledge, you’re a person who shares a piece of your soul to your students so make it count—help others with their own academic journey and dreams.

The Nuts and Bolts of Crafting a Welcome Letter to Clients

When a client avails of your service, you should give them a welcoming letter so that they can understand how you work. After all, your clients deserve to know your "classroom" rules and how to handle different aspects of your tutoring services. This can be done effectively if you know how to write an effective welcome letter. Always consider that your clients want to know more about your work process, so if you're wondering how to write that welcome letter, here are important points you should always consider in writing it.

Explain Your Tutoring Service

First things first, explain how your tutoring service works. Include the mission or objectives so that your client will know where you're coming from. Also, this gives your client a clear idea on how you handle your business. Having your client aware of the different parts of your business is important to ensure that the both of you maintain a strong working relationship. He or she would know what to expect from you and as a result, the both of you can work together with little misunderstanding.

Focus on the Specific Subject Matter

Elaborate on the subject matter your client has signed up for. Attach a syllabus or something so that your client knows what to expect during the tutorial service. Overall, provide him or her with a projection of how you're going to handle the topic so that your client can definitely know what to expect from your tutorial service.

It is important to explain the different aspects of the topic for your client so that your client can learn as you explain, with a background of the information in mind. Through this, you will find out that your client is more prepared, enhancing the tutorial interaction at hand.

Provide Agreement Notices

Where do you plan to have the tutorial? What is the specific schedule? These things will remind your client about your appointments. Moreover, it gives them a clear idea that you are serious in having them as clients for your tutoring service. This will establish the business relationship even more effectively, enhancing how the both of you deal with each other.

Agreement notices are effective reminders of commitment and development. This gives both the tutor and the tutoring client a sort of contractual agreement that they will uphold the given conditions drawn by contracts.

Request Suggestions

As a gesture of openness and as a testimony of your willingness to adapt to clients, it is important that you solicit suggestions so that your working relationship can improve over time. As a tutor, you will expect that clients may not accept how you handle things, so be open to whatever changes they want. The bottom line is to maintain a strong line of communication so that things work out the best way possible.

The welcome letter is your first impression toward a strong business relationship. Make it work and make sure it is written properly so that you effectively start out right and progress as smoothly as possible.

 

Setting a Holiday Schedule for Your Tutoring Clients

Tutoring usually happens during school days, especially after classes. Other times, during weekends. But, one of the best times to handle tutorials would be during the holidays. Specifically, summer or even Christmas break. But, these are times when students usually prefer to relax from school work and just spend the time enjoying. But, if you can tutor over the holidays, that's a definite plus for your income and for the students. The hardest part is getting them interested in the whole scheduling thing, especially since you'll be taking their holiday away from them. But, here are ways you can motivate students to engage in your tutoring service even during the holidays.

Market Your Service as an Important Development Scheme

What you should engage on is marketing your service as a development scheme. Make students want to engage in your tutoring services so that they can supplement their knowledge during the holidays. It is clear that students would prefer relaxation over additional learning; however, if you provide them with the right incentive to learn over the holidays, you will find out that you can enhance the business projection of your tutoring service.

It helps to market your service properly by motivating students to expand their knowledge over an interesting topic. For instance, don't market your tutoring service for a simple Biology lecture. Market it as an additional discussion on let's say, stem cell and its development in society. Not only does this make Biology sound even more interesting, but it provides students with that uniqueness, making the subject sound a whole lot more interesting.

Focus on giving Advanced Lessons

You can also provide a schedule for tutoring during the holidays by providing advanced lessons. Students can learn a lot about next semester's topics with a few refresher courses over the holidays. This can help students prepare for the subjects to come and to enhance their learning curve so that they can perform a whole lot better next time around. Focus on providing parents with the opportunity that their children can enhance their knowledge for future subjects. The good thing about advanced lessons is that these provide students with the opportunity to learn something new while taking rest. They aren't pressured, and they retain most of the information at hand. Through this, students can gain better perspectives in the various lessons they learn.

Provide Promotions

The best way to schedule in tutor clients in the holidays is to offer your services at a lower price. This way, students would choose to engage in your tutoring services more readily because of the cheaper rate. Providing more services for lower prices can help your business flourish because you encourage students to pay for your service at better rates.

Getting tutoring gigs during holidays can be tough, especially since students prefer to relax. However, if you tap into the right measures for gaining business, you can earn a little extra by providing tutorial services to students who desire it. It's how you market your business that will determine how many students will enroll in your holiday “specials”.

 

What have you used as promotions or scheduling that has helped or hindered your tutoring services? 

How School Districts View Tutoring?

Tutoring has always been a supplementary to many students who need that extra help outside of regular class hours to catch up with academic material or even learn something new so that they won't have to worry about new lessons coming up. School districts have different perceptions regarding tutoring services, especially in the merits they provide and the problems that may arise due to some bad eggs.

Some tutoring providers are known to abuse their clients by conducting fraudulent services. In fact, the money that has been cheated out of the clients can amount to over $500,000 in a district. As such, the tutoring industry has been marked by local districts as one that is prone to abuse. Hence, tutoring hasn't been necessarily that completely beneficial for these students, especially in extravagant charges that may arise.

The actions taken by school districts involve moderating the various tutoring providers in affected districts, limiting the area of contact that tutors may require in expanding their services. Because of the fraudulence by other providers, tutors in general suffer from the problems that others have given to school districts. Because of this, it is important to take measures that will ensure that tutors are not viewed as people who extort money, but those that help students through honest service.

In fact, tutoring has become vital in many school districts because it provides students with a more integrated approach to learning, something that goes beyond the four walls of the classroom setting. Tutoring offers intimate communication, which is necessary for enhanced learning. Tutoring basically works, because it provides students with more insight and an increased body of knowledge needed for them to perform better in class and even real life instances.

Moreover, the need for tutoring has increased because students need more attention rather than the standard methods taught in schools. Students require something fresh to ensure that such learning is retained. Through the varied approach by tutors, students learn a lot and perform better because of innovative ways to ensure the information they understand is effectively put to practice. That way, students develop an even more integrated approach to learning that tutoring services specialize in providing.

As a result, so that tutoring service can provide their services to the district-in-concern, schools have sought out measures to safeguard the district. This involves the creation of tutoring programs of their own where tutors can integrate in, especially as these programs would be with trusted partners or allies in the industry. Honestly, who could blame them? Tutoring suppose to be about helping others and a quality program takes at least 20 sessions to see progress, if not sooner. This really depends on the learner’s needs.

Overall, the projection of school districts and tutoring may be on shaky ground for a while because of the fraudulence involved, but the scenario looks bright. With this in mind, it is important to consider the different concerns that are involved in the development process. This will help shape effective tutoring that will not only enhance the industry, but strengthen relations among schools. Without them, some tutors wouldn’t have students to teach, so it is important to maintain such effective connections and keep the focus on the learner. A quality program will definitely bring in more clients or even referrals. It doesn’t get any better than that!

With this said, as a tutor, what would you suggest to improve school district relations? Let’s be proactive and focus on what tutoring providers can do to correct this situation.