Tutoring and academic coaching both aim towards improving a student’s knowledge and skills. As proof of this improvement, the student’s grades pull up. This boosts the student’s self-confidence and motivation to learn more.

However, tutoring differs from academic coaching in application. Tutoring is often applied when the student has difficulty in one subject area, such as Math, Science or English. The tutor’s expertise with a particular subject is very beneficial in this case.

Academic coaching works better when the student has difficulties in multiple subjects. It incorporates tutoring, which focuses on specific goals, such as finishing homework on time, achieving a certain level of reading comprehension or increasing grades from C to A.

Academic coaching also works towards those goals, but the in-home tutor who practices academic coaching goes beyond simple tutoring. The best tutors work with parents and teachers in creating a strategic plan for improving a student’s academic skills as well as life skills, such as time management and goal setting. In effect, a good tutor to hire is someone who knows academic coaching. This person is responsible for teaching your child how to read for retention, how to break down projects into components, how to do quality control, and how to take notes effectively.

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.

With jobs hard to come by in the United States during the current recession, many professionals are turning to tutoring as a way to earn extra money and to make a difference in their communities.  With budget cuts going on in school districts around the country, many qualified teachers have recently been laid off and are looking for work.

At the same time, because schools are cutting teachers from their payroll, class sizes are going up and student performance is suffering as a result.  In the wake of this, tutoring services are booming.

Although published in 2006, The Tutoring Revolution: Applying Research for Best Practices, Policy Implications, and Student Achievement by Rowman & Littlefield Education comprehensively discusses the importance of the benefits of tutoring for students based on research-driven results.  Their recommendations provide an excellent resource for tutors nationwide and one of their conclusions is that tutoring, in-home tutoring programs in particular by well-trained professionals, can have a significant impact on learning outcomes.

Summer is a great time for students to work on study skills, get caught up on subject material, and study for standardized tests.  Some students enroll in summer school classes and have ongoing homework assignments while others have spoken with their teachers at the end of the previous semester to get recommendations on what they can work on over the summer.

We have a lot of parents that contact us over the summer that want to work on specific skills like math or writing and we do our best to connect them with a tutor that can help them in their home.  Depending on when a customer contacts us, we can talk to the students’ teacher(s) and get recommendations on additional assignments and activities they can work on over the summer.  If we are not able to reach the students’ teacher, then our tutors can usually come up with other materials to use.

Aside from improving on subject material from the previous school year, a lot of parents want to keep their child’s brains from turning to mush over the summer. Signing up for a class or contacting a tutoring service can be a good way to keep things fresh so that they come better prepared for the upcoming school year. It also helps to build a relationship with a tutor early on so that the tutor can catch problems early once the school year starts again.