Tutor Tips

It is true that our brains need new and different stimuli—hence the importance of changing it up and adding variety—but it is also true that we need routines in our learning. Instructional routines build in structure, consistency, and repetition, which most students require in order to learn. Any activity can become a routine, as long as the instructions and pacing are the same each time and clear to the student. 

For math, common examples are ‘wrong answers only,’ ‘notice and wonder’, ‘which one doesn’t belong’, ‘think-pair-share,’ and ‘slow reveal’. Notice how these activities can easily be applied for language tutoring as well. Other activities that you may recognize and that work for all subjects include guided discussion, quick-writes, information gaps, ‘same or different’, ‘would you rather’, ‘convince me that’, and ‘word/ number of the day’. You get the idea. Not only can these activities lead to deeper thinking, but they are interactive and fun. 

Please see examples of these routines and more in our Instructional Learning Library. If you don’t tutor math, Harvard Project Zero’s Thinking Routines Toolbox is a great place to start exploring, and many of these serve all students in all subject areas, as they are centered around critical and creative thinking and problem solving.

You probably have routines that you already use in your sessions. Do you use them regularly? Do you ensure that they are consistent? Do students know exactly what to do when the time comes? Those are the key attributes of an instructional routine.

It is so simple, but journals, binders, or notebooks where everything is in one place are valuable for so many reasons. 

Dated journals add an element of accountability and progress tracking as well as create a space for expression and practice. Students can divide them in sections and use them for vocabulary, daily writing, the writing process for a piece that they want to publish (like a letter or recipe to share), ideas and doodles, and responses to readings with writing, charts, drawing, key words, and so on. Encourage color and variety. Students might even tape in comics or readings or tickets to respond to, and the journal becomes a bit of a scrapbook. You will know quickly what your student is comfortable with and open to. The sky is the limit! 

When you first give your student a notebook (or they bring one), bring along some magazines, scissors, and glue and let them personalize it while you do your own. This step really helps any age student gain immediate ownership of the journal.

Tutors and students can also use these to have written conversations, which is a great way to model writing without formal correction.

Tutors can use their own tutor journals for lesson plans, notes on sessions (time/length, how lessons went, students’ progress), and brainstorming ideas. Write on! 

One of the best strategies for ANY learner, including students with learning difficulties, is to utilize visuals of all kinds. The word “visual” does not just refer to pictures. Visuals can also be videos, stories, analogies, metaphors, maps, diagrams, charts, infographics, GIFS and memes, comics, real life objects, illustrations: anything that helps to create images in our minds. In fact, the reason mind-maps and graphic organizers are such an effective strategy is because they aid us in creating mental models. While people may have different preferences, all brains need visuals to learn. In fact, just for fun, next time you do an online search on a topic, try searching with images.

Royalty-free images can of course be found on search engines, but also try Adobe/ Canva, Unsplash/ Pixabay, and other free image sites. College, library, and museum collections like the Getty are also good sources. Here is a collection of collections from Alberta Teachers Association, and here are a few other resources for you to get started incorporating more images. (Of course, the easiest way to begin is for you and your student to draw and bring in real objects/ photos.) Happy visualizing!

• Math Eyes has wonderful mathematical images by area

• The New Readers Press Visual Literacy series incorporates visual maps, graphs, charts, diagrams in ready-made lessons

• For amazing photographs: National Geographic

• The New York Times’ What’s Going On In This Picture? uses photographs for creative conversations

• Check out these ESL image prompts from BrainPop and these Pics4Learning organized by categories

• Colorin’ Colorado is a solid resource for English language learners and their families with a special emphasis on using images to support learning

• Pathways to Literacy includes Google slides of images for learning vocabulary by theme, and Quizlet allows easy searches to add images for vocabulary

• The ISL Collective includes a nice collection of videos

May is mental health awareness month. Of course, talking about mental health needs to be destigmatized by doing so all year long, but now is a good time to mention a couple of lesson plan resources that you can use with your students. Every single person is struggling in some way, and our students are likely to have more stressors that most. On top of everything going on in their lives, English language learners are often living in fear. Our basic literacy students’ lives are frequently in transition in one way or another. Health literacy in particular is critical: If a person doesn’t understand what they are reading or hearing in regard to a health issue, then that can become a dangerous situation.

While we are not counselors or health practitioners, we are educators, and there is no reason not to use mental health lessons to teach and tutor language just as we use other health lessons. If your student is not quite comfortable about talking about mental health yet, you can start with very small amounts of check-in conversation or by reading short news articles together.

Here are a few sites to get you started:

• #IamABE's mental health lessons are designed for high beginning English language learners and include all four language skills.

• Here is a collection of resources and lesson plans with a focus on emotions and stress from the English Empowerment Center.

• The Illinois Community College Board has a public collection of statewide contextualized curricula that includes The Healthcare Contextualized Bridge Curriculum for more advanced learners with a theme (8) on mental health.

• Bonus: Virginia Adult Learning Resource Center’s “Bag of Rocks” lesson.

Did you know that adults lose attention after 8-12 minutes, and it’s getting worse? That tells us that we need to practice in a variety of ways and we need brain and movement breaks. This can be as simple as a walk to the restroom, a quick stretch, or a snack/ coffee break. Movement stimulates our brains so that we can take that new information in. Breaks give us the time to digest information. Some fun ideas that you can do related or not to the lesson at hand:

• 5 deep breaths with arm movement: up, out, down

• Walk and talk about a related example or story (or walk and find, draw, etc.: you fill in the blank)

• Chair or standing stretching

• Scavenger hunts or mini field trips

• Floor, table, or wall writing

• Stand/ bend/ reach and ...

• Role plays

• Show and tell

• Stations @ the space

• Ball throwing

• Move to the music

All of these can be short and sweet, and most take little to no preparation. Get in the habit of adding them into your sessions instead of sitting in one place the entire time. If your student asks why, say 'research': It’s good for us AND helps us remember!

Did you know that learning causes changes to the actual physical structure of our brains? Our brains have selective learning? “Use it or lose it” is absolutely true when it comes to learning? Our brains require challenge to learn? Learning is unlikely if we feel unsafe or have negative emotions? Do you think your student(s) know these facts? 

If not, discussing metacognition, or the awareness and analysis of one’s own learning and thinking processes, is an effective way to help your learner understand why they may or may not be retaining what they learn and how to do so more effectively. The ability to talk about our thinking is important for every single one of us, and a tutor can model this process by “thinking aloud” and asking reflective questions. 

Some examples:

• What do you know about yourself as a student? What are you proud of as a student? What is your biggest hurdle in learning new things? How might you conquer it?

• What is your goal for today’s session? How might we make that into a set of smaller goals? What do you think is the best way to approach them?

• What do you feel like you are understanding well? What are you not understanding? What strategies can help you? What questions do you still have about …? 

• Was this task easy, medium, or difficult and why? What did you learn by completing this task? What was most helpful from our session today? What was most challenging?

You will find that your student most likely can already tell you a lot about their learning strengths and challenges. If we consider that our role is to help students think scientifically in different ways and not to give them the answers but to help them discover them, then it changes our approach to tutoring. 

Learning how to think critically and creatively is much different than simply learning how to perform a task. If my student needs to be able to write a short report for work, we can practice it by following a format, but that doesn't help my student with the thinking process behind the writing or with the next kind of writing she needs to do. We have to teach both.

The great thing about designing universally is that you are making a plan to reach all students within the context of your lesson ahead of time. In adult education and literacy, we don’t always know who will be in attendance if we have a small group or class. In one-to-one tutoring, we don’t always know what our student needs. 

UDL started in architecture because architects had to make sure, for example, that a building was accessible to everyone, that the environment was appealing to everyone, that the space incorporated specific characteristics that made it easy to use—for everyone! The same framework works in education. Here are some tips as you are planning sessions: 

Start with a Clear Goal

Goals keep instruction focused on what learners should achieve, not just how they achieve it. It is important to 

state the goal at the start of the lesson; ask learners how this goal connects to their life, work, or future plans; and offer different ways to reach the goal.

Did you know that making a mistake puts your "brain on pause"? Many of us have heard of Carol Dweck's work into the growth mindset and recognize that making mistakes are a big part of how we learn. However, we do need a little time after making mistakes to digest, reflect, and reset. It's important to remember this when working with students. Are you providing that time? 

We all make mistakes and learn from them. Do you show your own mistakes and talk about them with your students? This is the first step: the awareness by all that errors are inevitable and needed. The next step is to ask, what is the purpose of the activity? If we are working with a student who is learning English as a second (or third, or fourth) language, the big goal is usually effective communication. If that is the case, it is important not to interrupt your student when they are communicating, as well as to not correct them above their level (because what good does that do?). 

If the goal is accuracy in a specific email that the student will be sending in real life, then that is entirely different and might go through a writing process with editing and correction as the final step. If the entire class is struggling with a specific area, then it makes sense to approach that as a mini-lesson for everyone without singling anyone out.

Since we also want students to be able to spot their own mistakes, then wait time, or pausing, also matters. If this is difficult, can we point them in the direction of where a mistake might be, be it in spoken or written communication? 

What about when students ask to be corrected? Check out the resources below to reflect on this important question!

Note: The above tips are based on the Macmillan Education blog by Sarah Hillyard "Let Them Speak: Tackling Oral Error Correction" that you can listen to or read here: Let Them Speak: Tackling Oral Error Correction. You can read or listen to it here.