The Tutor.com Blog

School Districts working on Race to the Top District (RTTT-D) applications know that a key component is personalized learning environments that prepare students for college and careers. As a leader in personalized, one-to-one learning that improves student achievement and teacher learning, Tutor.com is a strong partner that can give your school district’s plan a distinct edge.

Districts that work with Tutor.com get custom, personalized learning environments specific to their students’ needs and instructional tools and support for teachers. Here’s how we support the RTTT-D requirements:

• College and Career Readiness: Tutor.com custom programs provide individual student data that tracks each student’s progress. We supplement reporting with training and ongoing program support for students.

• Pursue Rigorous Coursework: Several schools have selected Tutor.com to customize an AP program for their students. Students find that access to individual support focused on their needs throughout the school year help them learn faster and be successful in the most challenging courses. In a survey of 1,000 high school students, 86% said they’d be more likely to take AP courses if they had access to Tutor.com.

• Improve teaching and leading: Tutor.com com offers MyLivePD™ Online Coaching Service. This is the only live, online professional development program that has been proven to make an immediate impact on student learning. 90% of teachers connecting to Tutor.com’s instructional coaches reported they used the information within one week in their classrooms. This level of support accelerates teachers’ learning allowing them to implement new practices successfully and adapt content for different student learning styles.

Tutor.com has been creating customized learning programs for more than a decade for school districts,  statewide after-school homework help programs and 24/7 academic support for U.S. Military Families through the  Department of Defense.

Learn more about how we can support our RTTT-D application by joining a free webinar on Wednesday, October 3^rd from 2:00 p.m. – 2:30 p.m. ET. Rachel Vessey Gibson, Whiteboard Advisors will address how districts can best position themselves to win Race to the Top for Districts grants. Ms. Gibson served as the Presidential Management Fellow at the U.S. Department of Education where she developed and implemented Race to the Top policies.

If you are interested in speaking with Tutor.com about how we can be your partner in personalized learning for your RTTT-D application, contact us today at educate@tutor.com.

By Joan Rooney, Tutor.com’s Vice President of Instruction

The educational world has increasingly looked to neuroscience to expand our knowledge on what actually happens in the brain when students learn. Learning involves growing brain connections. Some key points are:

• Learners need to be able to connect new information to something they already know. In other words, new material must connect to existing “material” in the brain.
• Learners who engage with the material are more likely to retain that information.
• Use it or lose it – it’s true.
• The more ways something is learned, the more memory pathways are built.

What are the ramifications of these ideas for our work with students?

Our goal is to encourage and support the student in understanding and seeing the relevance of the concept with which he or she is struggling. We encourage our students to relate this material to something they already know, whether that be a similar type of problem, concept or life experience.
We also engage the student with the learning by asking open-ended questions such as:

• What do you think we are trying to solve here?
• Why do you think you should take that step?
• What do you think would happen if…,
• What if we looked at it this way?
• How could we test your idea, solution, theory?

Each time the student articulates information about the topic, the student is reflecting and processing information. This is a good thing!

We also use all of the tools at our disposal to help the student. Drawings and diagrams on the whiteboard, chat, the use of web resources with pictures, manipulatives, varying colors – any of these might resonate with the student’s particular style of learning.

The National Education Association summed it up nicely in their #thankateacher sample tweets: “if you can write your name, if you can read, and if you followed your dream, then there is a teacher you can thank.” From the simplest tasks to the most complicated concepts, teachers are there to help us learn.  And often that can go unnoticed. So today, along with thousands of others, we are celebrating all the things teachers have done for us!

I’d like to thank my dad, Ed Sobanski. I never had him as a teacher in a classroom, but he taught Math for over 30 years and would sometimes help me with my homework. Thanks to him I always had an appreciation of Math and saw learning as a fun game rather than a challenge. Thanks, Dad! – Evelyn Sullivan, Onboarding Manager

I’ll always remember Bill McCandless, Honors English Literature Teacher, 11^th grade, South Lake High School.  Mr. McCandless helped all of us see past the sometimes difficult vernacular of Shakespeare’s plays, showing the true drama and humor inherent in Shakespeare classics such as Macbeth and Hamlet.  I can still recall his explanation of just exactly how “Birnam Wood did come to Dunsinane Hill.” He also helped me realize that I needed to broaden my tastes and start reading outside of the genres that I usually chose back then.  From across a veritable gulf of years, a shout out to Mr. McCandless!! – Tom Squillace, Sales Director

Mrs. JoAnn Puleo (11th and 12th grade: Commercial Art & Photography). It’s because of her that I do what I do, and I love what I do. – Duane Romanell, Creative Services Director

My sister, Betsy Schrage (5^th Grade – Oxford, MI). Thank you for putting your heart and soul into teaching students about the values of teamwork and maintaining an open-mind.  Your kids are going to be world travelers and thought leaders thanks to the year they spent with you. – Steve Schrage, Marketing Coordinator – Military & Federal

My favorite teacher was Kathleen Depres. Not only was I lucky enough to have her as my fourth grade teacher, but she was my sixth grade teacher as well when she decided to leave the elementary school soon after I did.    What I remember most about her was her sense of adventure and curiosity. She loved to travel the world and explore new cultures. After every school vacation, she would bring us back tales of her adventures that she would craftily weave into the day’s grade school lessons. Because of that, I want to say thank you Ms. Depres for passing on to me your passion for learning as well as an amazing sense of adventure that still burns within. – Linda Gordon, K12 Trainer

Which teacher would you like to thank?

The buzz in 1-to-1 right now is about BYOD – Bring Your Own Device – and it’s not a fad and it’s not going away. There’s a convergence of factors causing it including:

• Hardware is diverse and at price points that are more affordable
• Schools are hyper budget conscious
• The “cloud” (previously called The Internet, the Web and the Information Superhighway) is ideal for core apps which are free or inexpensive with such as Google (although be sure to use GAFE), and Zoho
• Parents are realizing that a digital device is necessary for learning
• Schools want to be sure students possess 21st Century skills

But BYOD upsets apple carts right and left. We’ve been building school infrastructures for a long time that have supported a data-centric model in that IT directors allow or disallow devices on the school network according to a set model which is partly about good design and support, partly about supporting what already exists and partly about not taking on new projects or approaches that require more work, resources, and skill sets. And I’ve been a tech director in schools so know firsthand that opening a can of worms when it impacts the network, the laptop/desktop standardization, and the hardware replacement plan is not something many people will relish.

But then there are the students. They grow and develop and move to the next grade level and out the door to college and to life. They need to be empowered and learn in an environment that encourages them to think and write and research and publish and present and analyze and create new ideas and solutions to problems. They also need to own and understand the vehicles used for learning. So this might mean BYOD.

In order for BYOD to work well there must be a strong partnership between administration, Board members, teachers, technology, students, and parents. Everyone is going to be impacted by 1-to-1 no matter how it is implemented, whether BYOD or a standard hardware platform either provided or specified by the school or district. But with BYOD it’s likely you are going to see some pushback from technology people because of the complexity, change, work, planning and resources required. So here are some questions to consider:

• Have you visited a BYOD school or district?
• If not a team with representative stakeholders should do so armed with lots of questions
• Are you already using Google or Zoho or some cloud solution?
• Without cloud apps BYOD is going to be nearly impossible to implement in a meaningful way
• You need the entire school/district community to be able to communicate, publish, present and share centrally
• How will you define BYOD?
• Will there be a minimum device or specification?
• Will smartphones be one of the devices?
• How’s your network – is it ready for
• Wifi everywhere with multiple roaming wireless devices
• Centralized data security (Barracuda, Lightspeed, etc.)
• How will you address logistics?
• Will students be charged with keeping their devices charged, ready and safe/secure?
• Will you have “loaner” devices?
• Will devices be locked up somewhere/somehow during lunch, tests, sports?
• How’s your curriculum?
• Are teachers already used to assignments in Google and in using online social media tools so that student work is already free of hardware requirements – and happening in “the cloud”?
• How’s your digital citizenship education?
• Do students already know how to keep a respectful appropriate digital footprint?
• In my book I talk about L.A.R.K. – technology use by students should be L – Legal, A – Appropriate, R – Responsible, K – Kind
• How’s your communication channel with parents, students?
• If the device is purchased, maintained, repaired and managed by parents and students, it’s going to be important to communicate often and well
• How’s your budget?
• Unless you have planned fully for the changes of BYOD you might be blindsided by some upgrades or unexpected costs so make sure to ask these questions when you are visiting BYOD schools

There are terrific schools that have been BYOD for years, The Harker School in San Jose comes to mind for instance. Many people I respect have been writing about BYOD including William Stites who posted this blog post for Educational Collaborators early this year, Lisa Nielsen who wrote about debunking BYOD for T.H.E. Journal and a recent article in District Administrator starts with a quote from Lucy Gray who I respect very much -this entire article by the way is an important read. The Laptop Institute which is highly recommended will have threads this summer in Memphis on BYOD.

BYOD can be a solution if you do your planning and homework and try to figure out up front exactly what you’re getting into and plan carefully. You’ll want to be ready to rethink your network as not being about enabling a few models of specific controllable devices but instead as a pathway to the cloud where your school/district-wide learning community resides.

If you teach or work in the K-12 environment, you are reading and hearing daily about personalized learning. In a recent T.H.E. Journal article Karen Cator, the United States Department of Education’s director of technology cited personalized learning as one of the five top ed tech trends for 2012. “I’m really excited about the opportunity to personalize learning environments–to make learning more efficient and effective because it’s more personal and it’s more closely related to who you are as a learner,” said Cator in the article.

Personalized learning is certainly not a new concept, but with the introduction of technology tools there’s new ways to implement this style of learning for students at every level of their education.

Tutor.com has been delivering personalized learning for the last decade. More than 7.5 million times a student has connected to a tutor for a one-to-one learning session. We take our cues directly from the students who come with a specific question or problem.

Learning with a Tutor; Not a Computer

While most personalized learning solutions focus on adaptive technologies, we rely on real, live human beings to give students something they rarely get in or out of school – individualized, personal attention focused on their specific question.

An experienced tutor works in real-time with a student in the online classroom to understand their problem, assess their knowledge and then provide a learning experience that helps them reach the “I get it” moment.   Our goal is to ensure that a student who has completed a Tutor.com 1:1:1 session has mastered the concept at hand and is ready to tackle a similar problem on their own.

Engaged, Confident Students

Students who get this personalized attention report that they are more confident in their academic abilities, better able to complete school assignments and see an improvement in their grades. Even better, students report a higher level of engagement in school. With engagement comes motivation and a propensity to stick out challenging courses such as algebra, chemistry, calculus and physics.

A survey we conducted with 1,000 students from across the country found that 86% were more likely to take an AP class if they knew an online tutor would be there to support them throughout the course.

Over the coming months, Tutor.com will be working with school districts to not only deliver personalized learning solutions to their students, but also provide analytics and insights that give teachers and instructors a better understanding of where students are falling behind and what additional support could best help these students stay on track.

The majority of the million online tutoring sessions Tutor.com provides each year are in math and more specifically in algebra. Over the last decade, students take algebra earlier and earlier. Today, we find most middle school students are enrolled in pre-algebra or algebra classes. So we were interested in reviewing a new study from Harvard University that found students moving from grade 5 into middle school show a “sharp drop” in math and language arts achievement. This persists through 10^th grade and may even hurt their ability to graduate high school and attend college.

While the study focuses on grade configuration and school transition, we see trends too with middle school students. For the first time in their academic lives, students hit the wall – the pre-algebra and algebra wall. That wall is hard and it leaves marks on the best of students.

Research shows that while approximately 16 percent of all U.S. 13-year-olds (the age at which many students are in eighth grade) were enrolled in algebra in 1986, this figure rose to 22 percent in 1999 and to 29 percent in 2004 (Perie, Moran, and Lutkus 2005). Over the past decade, we find more students are taking algebra even earlier, some beginning in sixth grade.

When kids hit that wall, many come to us and here’s what they say:

“No one can help me”: Many good students have informal academic support systems consisting of parents, older siblings or cousins and sometimes friends. That support system tends to fall apart with algebra. Parents don’t remember it and many say they were never that good at math to begin with. Students have less people to turn to and they start to see their grades drop.

“I don’t even know where to start”: We talk to students and read comments all the time that say they sit at home staring at the algebra homework and truly have no idea what they are doing or if they are headed in the right or wrong direction. They get frustrated and some simply give up.

“The teacher moves too fast”: As teachers tackle the problem of completing many concepts with a room of diverse learners, some students can’t keep up. Some students say they don’t understand the examples and techniques used in class. If they miss mastering a few concepts, soon they fall further and further behind.

“I don’t want to look dumb”: While third graders may bolster their raised hands and beg to be called upon, 7th graders tend to sit in the back and hope to go unnoticed. No one wants to ask a dumb or embarrassing question in front of their peers and friends.

What helps students get over these challenges? Immediate, differentiated and private support. When students use online tutoring for help they can tackle one question and one concept at a time and never feel embarrassed. By nature of the one-to-one relationship with a tutor, they can try different explanations and techniques until the content clicks for the student. And that’s all many students really need—the opportunity to have an “I get it” moment. And suddenly a door opens in the wall and they walk through.

“At first I had no idea where to start, I didn’t know what I was doing. I was just confused with my algebra, but after I had help from Tutor.com, I knew exactly what I was doing. Thanks tutor.com, you saved my life.” – 8th Grade Algebra student

Want to learn more about how Tutor.com helps students struggling with algebra?  Read Melissa and Kennedy’s math stories.

The Thomas B. Fordham Institute grabbed headlines a few weeks back when the organization released a new study that showed that the highest-achieving  or “high flyer” middle school students lose ground in high school.

About 30 percent of students who scored in the 90th percentile or higher on a math exam in sixth grade fell below that threshold by 10th grade.   Almost half of the high flyers in middle school reading fell below the 90th percentile by 10th grade.

While many factors may contribute to the descent of high flyers, the study’s authors cite NCLB and its focus on the poorest performing students as one potential problem.   Yet, there was also some good news. There were 4.3 percent more students who were high-achievers in high school math compared to the number who reached that mark in middle school.

The question for school administrators and teachers is how to bring up the poorest performing students while nurturing and challenging the high flyers.  To date, the answer has been to spend a majority of time and resources focused on the low achievers and hope the high flyers maintain their altitude.   Teachers may find themselves spending proportionately more time working with the struggling students, leaving little time to challenge the best students.

But, what if teachers could add one-to-one teaching and learning opportunities for every student, every day?

This is one of the services Tutor.com offers teachers and students to make classrooms better.  Adding a network of 2,500 professional online tutors into the school day allows teachers to create flexible, dynamic classrooms that serve all students’ needs.  Low performers may work one-to-one with a tutor until they master basic skills.  High achievers can work on more challenging concepts that push them to deeper subject mastery.  Every student gets individualized attention and there is a record of their questions and progress because each session is saved.

Even more telling is that the introduction of ongoing support from an expert tutor online in middle school may help create additional high flyers by high school.

Take a look at Melissa S.  who failed a math class only to re-take it with help from Tutor.com and receive the highest grade in the class.  Melissa is now in college and has completed college-level calculus, thanks to having ongoing support from professional tutors, ready to help with any challenge.  And Melissa’s grade in that college level calculus class?  A solid B-.   We’d put her in the high flyer category.

Our RSS feeds are chock-full of articles about how to change the public education system. It’s a vigorous and often passionate debate. Yet students, the people who are most affected by these discussions, are not part of the conversation. That’s why “Five things students say they want from education,” published by eSchool News last week caught our attention. Here’s the five points educators shared that they hear from students: 

• Interactive Technology
• Teacher Mentors
• Innovation
• Choice
• Real-world application and relevancy

In our world, which includes an interactive and innovative online classroom technology, we hear from thousands of students daily. Every time a student connects to a tutor in our online classroom, they have the opportunity to rate their session and leave a comment. Thousands do just that. We hear what they liked about the tutor and the technology. This feedback helps set the direction for product innovation. Over the past year we’ve developed several new features specifically because students tell us what they want; we listen and then deliver it. Here’s a few of those recent features and the student feedback that drove it. 

• Tutor.com To Go™:  Everything is getting smaller. Students want to take their education on the go on their favorite devices, and more schools are embracing the BYOT model. Our mobile app lets them connect to a tutor from an iPod Touch (the device almost every teen owns),  iPhone or iPad and soon on Android devices too. One student even told us they were working with a tutor from the dentist office waiting room–now that’s a committed student. 
• Favorite Tutors: We have about 2,500 tutors now and while they are all “awesome” ( most-used adjective by students in their comments),  students have their favorites and want to connect to them as much as possible. Favorite tutors keep the sessions private and anonymous, but empowers a student to select and save a list of their favorites and even seen when they’ll be online next. 
• Personal Accounts:  Around the clock access to resources and past sessions is important to students who may be studying late into the evening. Students who have a personal account can easily access their past sessions for review, and our system automatically suggests specific resources based on the types of questions students have asked. Now when a student logs in, they’ll see our top rated resources on quadratic equations if that’s what they’ve been working on.

Asking students what they want from their own education makes a lot of sense. Let’s do more of it.

Using iPads and BYOD is part of blended learning solutions. Here's the Tutor.com online classroom on an iPad.

We enjoyed reading two great posts from Tom Vander Ark over the past few days.  One article focused on extending the school day  in the Huffington Post and the other showed why teachers love blended learning in edReformer.   As an organization that has been delivering education technology solutions for a decade, we know how powerful and empowering integrating technology into day-to-day learning can really be for students and teachers.

Here’s some annotation to Tom’s edReformer post from our point of view which comes from delivering almost seven million online learning sessions.

You Teach Students Ready for Your Lesson

Imagine how great it is for a teacher to walk into a classroom knowing that his/her students have mastered the skills they need and are ready for that day’s lessons.  Vander Ark uses the inspiring School of One as an example.  We were thrilled to work with the folks and students at School of One this past school year to provide online tutoring to their students.  Our solution was one of the modules students could use to improve their math skills and stay on track. 

Motivate Hard to Reach Kids

We’ve heard from many of the students using our services that online tutoring solved some of their major motivational issues – embarrassment and pacing.   Many students who are struggling in a class don’t want to be embarrassed in front of their peers and ask “dumb” questions.  They don’t know how to or want to ask a teacher to slow down because they aren’t getting it.  This often leads to students just shutting down and becoming less and less motivated to learn the material.  And learning this way isn’t fun for them.

Connecting to an online tutor solves these issues and can be a major motivator for a reluctant student.  Our tutors live for “dumb” questions.  There’s no one around to judge the student since the experience is completely anonymous.  Tutors are happy to take it slow and work at the student’s pace until she understands the issue at hand.  The lesson is customized to the student and pacing really matters.  Students also tell us that learning is a little more fun when they’re using technology and “texting” with their tutor while learning in the online classroom.

Extend the Day

Blended learning with an online tutoring solution like Tutor.com empowers students to learn anywhere at any time.  Our services are 24/7 and while we don’t advocate for late night cramming, an 8:00 p.m. tutoring session after other extracurricular activities are over can make a big difference for students.  An 8^th grader in a challenging algebra course can spend another 30 minutes working one-to-one with a tutor until they “get” that tough concept from class.  No matter how dedicated a classroom teacher is, they simply can’t spend another 30 minutes of individual instruction time with every student that needs it.  But using technology and a distributed network of tutors, we can accomplish this task.  We also believe in the BYOD movement and launched Tutor.com To Go this past spring empowering students to connect to a tutor from their iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch.

Achievement Analytics

Every time a student has an online tutoring session, the session is saved, annotated by the tutor and mapped back to a standard.  Teachers have access to all this information and can see by individual student, class or grade where students struggle the most. The analytics are real-time and can be delivered as often as required, including the very next day.

Advanced Diagnostics

With all the data captured by Tutor.com from each learning session, it becomes much easier to track learning trends among students and deliver it to teachers and administrators.

What is or was your favorite class in school?  Nine times out of ten algebra, physics or calculus isn’t the answer.  For twenty five years the U.S. has been working to change that.  In fact, April is Math Month. Back in 1986 President Ronald Reagan created Mathematics Awareness Week.  The President wanted to acknowledge that while mathematics was increasingly important to the U.S. economy and society, enrollment in math courses was declining.  There was a lot of hoopla that first year with a national exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution and receptions on Capitol Hill. By 1999, the week was extended to a month.

These days the talk is around STEM or Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.  President Obama created the “Educate to Innovate” initiative in 2009 to encourage U.S. students to excel at math and science.  The President  even hosted the very first White House Science Fair in October, 2010 which featured robots, solar cars and rockets designed by students from across the country.

This year Tutor.com will complete around 1.1 million online tutoring and homework help sessions.  About 75% of those sessions will be in math and science.  Many students tell us that Tutor.com is the #1 reason they are sticking out challenging math and science courses, getting better grades and building their confidence.  Here’s what students and parents  (completely unedited)  in the past few months had to say about getting on-demand help from one of our expert math and science tutors.   And at least one student reports that algebra IS now their most favorite class!

“I found this program to very useful!! I don’t normally get stuck like I did in math and when I do I find it very hard to find someone or something that is able to put it in a way that I understand. I will most deffently be using this site more often and for other subjects”

“I use Tutor.com a lot for my math assignments, and my grades have boosted a lot. The tutors are extremely friendly and helpful(:”

“As an adult student coming back to school, this service is unbelievably helpful for me, especially with math. Thank you for providing this great service to your public. Very grateful!”

“I am so glad that I logged on to this to help my daughter with math homework.  We were banging our heads and not getting anywhere.  This thing is so great.”

“thank you so much.  i came on here with a problem from a study guide in algebra an i am now confident in passing my VERY BIG math test.   thanks again.    patric was a great tutor”

“algebra has now become my favorite subject and i have an a in my algebra class because of this great service!!!”

Are you using Tutor.com for help with math and science?  We’d love to hear your story.  Contact Jennifer Kohn at jkohn@tutor.com.

Education Technology Expert Joins Tutor.com to Lead Live On Demand Professional Development Program

Tutor.com is proud to welcome Pamela Livingston to the Tutor.com team. Ms. Livingston is now the Product Manager for The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Grant funded Live On Demand Professional Development Program. Pamela Livingston will be overseeing day-to-day operations and work with participating school districts to create a completely new professional development model to provide one-to-one support for math teachers.

Pamela Livingston has spent seventeen years directing education technology programs and helping teachers integrate technology at public, private and charter schools.   She is also a well-known expert on school laptop programs and published the ISTE bestseller “1-to-1 Learning: Laptop Programs that Work” after spending a year interviewing laptop leaders across the country.   As a frequent presenter and keynote at national and international venues, Ms. Livingston continues to assist educators with integrating digital technologies into the classroom environment. Read the press release.

You can learn more about Pamela Livingston on her blog, 1-to-1 Learning and on Twitter @plivings.

Don’t forget to follow Tutor.com @tutordotcom for more news about online learning, education and our professional development program.

Get Feedback. Make Changes. Monitor Outcomes. Repeat.

Last year, I was invited by recently retired Dean Ralph Fessler to join the Johns Hopkins University School of Education National Advisory Council. The mutually investigative conversations with Dean Fessler were compelling, touching on various underlying problems of the US education system and the role that JHU and other schools of education can and should play in driving desperately needed fixes. These intellectually honest and provocative talks made it easy to accept the invitation.

This past Saturday, I drove down to Baltimore for our second council meeting, where I took over as Chair of the National Advisory Council from Maryland Superintendent of Schools, Dr. Nancy Grasmick. I was also asked to present to the council about Tutor.com and how we operate. After getting through a quick history of the company and business facts (customer, tutors, students…), I tried to summarize the underlying concepts that drive the way we deliver a high quality educational experience in a way that engages students. I humbly propose that these concepts can and should drive the way our public schools educate our students. Here are the five points I spoke about that Tutor.com focuses on every day:

1. Student feedback and ratings. Regardless of who is paying for our services (Schools, Libraries, Parents, Corporations…), we treat the student, who is connecting to one of our tutors, as the customer. We strive to provide every customer with a great learning experience. The customer may not always be right (like when one of them wants our tutors to do their homework for them), but their post-tutoring-session feedback is critical and drives everything we do.
2. Complete Transparency. Every interaction between a student and tutor is recorded. We know exactly what happens in every tutoring session (chat log, whiteboard drawings, resources used…). These sessions are available for students to print out and share with their teachers, for parents to see what they’re spending money on, and for our tutors and mentors to review for quality control and continuous improvement.
3. Regular and Frequent Quality Control Review and Mentoring. Not just to make promotion, suspension, and termination decisions (which we do), but primarily to make sure that we are doing as much as we can to keep our tutors great and our students happy. Tutors, especially ones who also have day jobs as teachers in public schools or universities, are thrilled with the level of feedback and support our mentors provide, and tell us it has made them better educators in general.
4. High Standards.  When we first started providing on-demand live one-to-one help years ago, post-session satisfaction reviews from students were at about a 75% rate (got the help needed and would recommend to friend). We didn’t feel that was good enough. Now we are consistently at 95% after lots of hard work and investment in our tutors, our systems, and our technologies. Every student that comes to us is a motivated learner who is stuck at some point, and looking for help. It’s at those points that they either fall behind and lose confidence or get critical timely help to keep them on the right path. We have have high expectations for our tutors, as well as our students.
5. The Authority and Ability to Make Changes. We have all the data and feedback we need to know what needs improvement (e.g. new classroom tools) or which tutors aren’t doing as well as others. We, unlike most school principals, actually have the authority and the will to take action when necessary. Features get added to our online classroom and learning tools within weeks. Tutors are provided mentoring and professional development daily, and if no improvement is seen, they are no longer allowed to tutor our students. Because the student is the customer and the customer should not have to suffer through an inadequate learning experience.

5.5 Million one-to-one students sessions, and counting — about 100,000 more each month, with a 95% recommend rate. Mostly from Teens! Teens who’d much rather be doing a long list of other things than working on their homework or test prep with an online tutor.

You might read this and say, “well, that’s nice for Tutor.com, but I don’t see how our public schools could ever operate this way.” And then you would rattle off a dozen excuses for how there isn’t political will to change, or there isn’t enough money, or the system is too big and entrenched, or the tests aren’t good enough to truly understand our students, or it’s unfair to judge teachers by how well their students are performing, or we shouldn’t be teaching to tests… There are lots of excuses. I can list many more and I used to believe in them.

Now I get excited about the pace of change and how many people in powerful roles are no longer willing to accept the excuses, including Secretary Duncan’s rhetoric yesterday: “I think we are lying to children and families when we tell children that they are meeting standards and, in fact, they are woefully unprepared to be successful in high school and have almost no chance of going to a good university and being successful”.

In my next post, I’ll share some of the material I’m reading to get myself informed and knowledgeable about school/education reform movements, so I can make even a small difference when I can. You can start with these couple of recent NY Times Magazine front cover articles about what makes a great teacher and the role of teacher unions:

Building a Better Teacher

and

The Teachers’ Unions’ Last Stand

Thanks for reading,

George Cigale, gcigale@tutor.com

Previous CEO posts can be found at http://ceotutor.blogspot.com/