Often times, parents will ask me “how many hours of tutoring will we need?” My answer is always the same, that there are many factors involved in effective tutoring. The first being that it should be your child who wants a tutor and not the other way around.

An experienced tutor can either be a tremendous help or not much help at all depending on how interested the student is in working with them.

If it is only the parent who is interested in their child getting better grades and they are missing a large part of the equation. As a parent, you need to sit down with your child and have a serious discussion about the possibility that they might need some extra help with someone other than you but ultimately they need to come to that conclusion on their own.

After meeting with your tutor for the first time, you should have a discussion as a family afterwards about how the session went and agree together on whether or not you want to continue with the tutoring.

Every tutor has a different teaching style and personality. Assuming your family and the tutor clique in this department and you believe the tutor has sufficient experience and knowledge of the material, based on your finances, you child’s needs, and any recommendations from your tutor or your child’s teacher, you should come up with a plan for how often you will want the tutor to come and how long the sessions should be.

The most effective tutoring combination is usually when a tutor comes regularly, 1-2 times per week or more, followed by additional assignments from the tutor and/or teacher(s) to help fully master the material and to see really improvement. I also recommend ongoing dialogue between the family, tutor, and teacher(s) so that everyone stays involved and engaged in the goal of improvement.