Tuesday, September 24, 2013

I'm one month into my second year of tutoring math at an urban high school, serving almost all ELL students. Now that I have a degree and a year of school-specific experience under my belt, there are some aspects of my tutoring that I want to improve.

  1. Spiral Review daily.
    Our official curriculum has built-in review days, but they are designed to target only the skills that we taught that past week. I've been slowly creating review cards with questions from every topic we've studied so far, so I can pull them out and let students choose a random card (skill) to practice.
  2. Teach note-taking and note-using skills.
    Even if my students are technically placed in 9th or 10th grade, due to possible interrupted schooling, many of them are not used to "doing school", or what they need to do other than just sit and learn in order to succeed in high school. With some of my younger students, or those with major organizational issues, I write out a set of notes as the lesson goes on, and tell them, "Make your notes look like mine." Then, as we accumulate more lessons in their notebooks, I encourage them to look in their notebooks for answers before they ask me.
  3. Create cumulative vocabulary sheets.
    I'm still undecided whether it'd be better to create a long list of words at the back of their notebooks (or on a separate sheet), or to make an outline before each section with the words and phrases written in, with space for them to write definitions and translations, and show examples. The latter worked excellently last year for the Algebra I unit on linear equations, so I might try that again this year, even if it requires more upfront work on my part.
  4. ELL support, even for English speakers.
    By the nature of this particular high school, every student in the academy is enrolled in an ELL class along with their content classes. Even if the students are comfortable with spoken, social English, all of them need help practicing the academic language structures that will let them be successful in their content classes, and eventually be able to transfer into one of the other academies (that isn't specifically designed for newcomers and ELLs). These techniques could include writing sentence stems into their notes; encouraging students to discuss problems with each other in English or Spanish and responding to them in English; and pre-teaching the vocabulary needed for an upcoming section.
As the year goes on, I also intend on keeping detailed notes on how I teach all of the different topics, and what did/didn't work for various students. Even though I can remember most of the techniques for myself the next time I see that topic, my notes could possibly help some of the new tutors this year and in the future.

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