Micro-Credentialing | Tutoring Center Administration: Best Practices & Innovations
What Is Micro-Credentialing?
A micro-credential is a short, competency-based recognition that allows an educator to demonstrate mastery in a particular area.
View Micro-Credentialing Tour!
Overview
Tutoring programs are constantly evolving, incorporating new strategies for student success and integrating new technologies. How can teams effectively administer tutoring centers? What are best practices and innovations that can help inform the coordination and administration of tutoring programs? In this series, administrators will gain skills, insights and strategies into evaluating tutoring programs, collecting and analyzing data, as well as recruiting, training and retaining tutors.
Join us for this 6-part micro-credentialing series designed to help tutoring centers recruit and retain talent while evaluating practices to ensure their maximizing effectiveness and best supporting learners.
Registration is individually-based, allowing participants to customize their learning experience. Participants are required to view the 3 required workshops to earn their micro-credential certificate.
Benefits
- Six on-demand sessions focused on best practices and innovations in tutoring administration.
- A personalized learning path allowing employees to select workshops tailored to their career goals and responsibilities.
- A self-directed, on-demand learning format allowing you to start and stop the learning experience at any time.
- A comprehensive training package that communicates your knowledge, skills, achievements, and competencies to employers, colleagues, and peers.
- A certificate verifying that you have learned skills that differentiate you both academically and professionally
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A cost-effective training program which can be used to upskill your workforce, build highly-skilled teams, and provide professional development opportunities that will ultimately improve employee retention
Institutions can purchase one or many seats. Discounts available.
The following 3 courses are required to earn the credential:
- Tutoring Center Administration: Best Practices For Hiring, Tracking & Reporting
- Using Quantitative Data To Evaluate Tutoring, SI & Study Groups
- Tutoring Center Administration: Supervising & Retention Strategies Post-COVID
Tutoring Center Administration: Best Practices For Hiring, Tracking & Reporting
OverviewRunning a tutoring center, especially as the sole administrator or one with a super small staff, can be very taxing in many ways. However, regardless of staff size, all tutoring centers require processes and procedures for recruitment, hiring, record-keeping, payroll, employee observation, and program evaluation. In this webinar, 30+ year Tutor Center veteran Mike Kassel breaks down the processes of tutoring center administration and provides ideas for effective administration, record keeping, and reporting.
Objectives
- Identify basic tutor center processes
- Develop procedures for each of the identified methods, including:
- Legal and procedural aspects of hires
- Explaining procedures to faculty
- Verification of employee work hours
- Developing effective observations and self-reflection documents
- Consider a variety of ways to evaluate program effectiveness
- Utilizing faculty in recruitment
- Learn how to document tutor/SI Leader training and employment
- Learn how to create an effective schedule
- Discover how to work with stakeholders, including faculty and HR
- Identify how to send reporting data out to the campus
- Explore how to keep, sort, and archive documentation
Presenter
Dr. Michael Kassel
Using Quantitative Data To Evaluate Tutoring, SI & Study Groups
OverviewEvaluating tutoring programs, Supplemental Instruction (SI), student study groups, and other forms of academic assistance related to courses are not new practices. What may be newer, however, is some increased attention on the sophistication of those evaluation formats. Qualitative evaluation such as satisfaction surveys and narratives about students’ successes and comparative evaluation (e.g., accreditations and certifications) are still appropriate and relevant measures of successful academic assistance for students. However, many programs find themselves being asked for something more quantitative and more sophisticated than numerical summaries of clients’ grades and service usage.
“All of our developmental math students have low ACTs. How can I show their good progress?”
“What can I do to satisfy funding requirements for statistical data?”
“I am confident that the students we tutor are benefitting as they get more help, but can I prove it?”
“What measures can I use to show student improvement on such a limited A-F grade scale?”
In this webinar, we will explicitly address a program’s access to, the creation of, and protection of student data. We will also discuss the basic descriptive kinds of information most programs generate. The focus will then turn to additional statistics that can clarify and confirm program impacts on student academic performance and persistence.
Objectives
- Understand how to create, access and protect student data
- Review basic descriptive statistics related to program clients
- Learn how to use most common t-tests appropriately
- Learn how to compute ANOVA when necessary
- Determine appropriate methods for correlation and partial correlation
- Find computational assistance for statistical calculations
Presenter
Jan Norton
Tutoring Center Administration: Supervising & Retention Strategies Post-COVID
Many tutoring centers needed to make major changes to support students during the time of COVID. Some of these changes directly impacted the experiences of peer tutors. Supervisors of tutors had to deal with many challenges to engage and retain their tutors over the past year. As tutoring services moved online, in many institutions for the first time, tutors needed additional training and support to ensure they were confidently able to provide tutoring to students. At the same time, because tutoring was occurring more frequently in virtual spaces, additional challenges arose. New tutors, who benefit the most from direct supervisor feedback on developing their tutoring strategies, did not have the same access to in-time observations of their tutoring sessions. Further, with masking, quarantining, and social distancing, many tutors felt disconnected from their co-workers and their tutees as well. This sense of isolation continued for many, even after restrictions were lifted.
While COVID presented these and other challenges to tutoring center teams, the past year also highlighted the importance of key strategies in retaining and engaging a peer tutoring staff. Using the results of a survey of tutors at one learning center and research on best practices in centers, this webinar will explore strategies for building on the changes during COVID, such as online tutoring. In addition, we will identify priorities for tutoring centers to consider for the upcoming year, including the importance of community building in the center and providing feedback for student employees. Taking the time now to reflect back and to plan for the upcoming academic year will further enhance the tutoring center’s effectiveness by focusing efforts on our tutors’ development and engagement.
Objectives
- Reflect on the challenges of engaging with and supervising tutors over the past year due to COVID
- Discuss hiring practices that can help with tutor retention and that take into account the remote nature of engagement with applicants
- Identify training strategies that prepare tutors for online tutoring and other post-COVID related challenges
- Learn about ways to create an engaged community of tutors
- Develop approaches to providing effective feedback to tutors on their performance
Presenters
Laurie L. Hazard
Stephanie Carter
To earn this credential, please select 3 courses from the following list:
- Creating Short Videos To Promote Your Tutoring Center: It’s Fun, Easy
- Adapting Your Tutoring And Coaching Services For The Online Learning Environment
- Hybrid Tutoring Centers: Advantages, Challenges & The Future Of Online Services
- Training Tutors To Help Tutees With Study Skills & Strategies
- How Asynchronous Online Tutoring Can Meet The Needs Of Online Students
- Intrusive Tutoring: Utilizing Advising, Coaching & Counseling Strategies
- Tutoring Gen Z: How Generational Differences Impact Teaching & Learning
- How To Effectively Tutor Students With Disabilities
Creating Short Videos To Promote Your Tutoring Center: It’s Fun, Easy
OverviewCreating stunning videos promoting your Tutoring Center’s services is easy, fun and super-inexpensive. This webinar shows beginners, as well as the tech and video savvy, how to define a story, assemble your cast and crew, and get inexpensive equipment and software to make your vision a reality. Let your students know about the great work you do through a documentary-style, attention-grabbing video that can increase traffic to your Tutoring Center. As a bonus, you can adapt all these techniques for making training and demonstration videos.
Objectives
- Identify the story or stories you want to tell
- Select the level of production and the equipment needed, emphasizing free or very low-cost materials
- Download low-cost software for the Mac or PC
- Determine if the project will be scripted or not scripted (spoiler alert, we’re going for non-scripted).
- Recruit your subjects and your crew from your program and other school programs
- Understand and utilize basic film techniques to improve video quality
- Learn some basic concepts regarding film production and editing
- Apply these lessons to training and demonstration video projects
Presenter
Dr. Michael Kassel
Adapting Your Tutoring And Coaching Services For The Online Learning Environment
Overview
During this unprecedented time, ill-prepared students have been thrust into an online learning environment. While it is quite simple to move services to Zoom or Collaborate Ultra, it is quite another thing to recognize and help students deal with the new concerns and challenges online students face during a pandemic. This webinar will explore how a school can set up or adapt existing learning strategies tutoring/academic coaching programs to address the specific needs of current students to help them thrive during these trying times.
Objectives
- Understand the need/purpose of Learning Strategies tutors/academic coaches
- Understand how LS tutoring differs for online students and students struggling to survive challenging times.
- Know how to survey students, tutors, faculty, and IT support for specific issues on your campus.
- Learn to involve your current tutors in the planning process.
- Develop a Learning Strategies checklist.
- Establishing a solid training program for the new/updated service.
Presenter
Dr. Michael Kassel
Hybrid Tutoring Centers: Advantages, Challenges & The Future Of Online Services
OverviewWhile many of us converted to online services literally overnight back in March 2020, a year-plus of online delivery via Zoom and other platforms has become, in many ways, a new normal for tutorial delivery. While it is true that many students and tutors cannot wait to get back to tutoring in person, we need to realize that there are various advantages to offering both forms of service delivery. This webinar discusses the benefits and mechanics of forging a hybrid online and in-person center outside of the lockdowns and absence from campus.
Objectives
- Explore what was our pre-pandemic delivery like and how much of it was online
- Learn how our online services changed throughout the lockdowns and through the pandemic
- While much is being written about students’ eagerness to re-engage face-to-face, what about our students who are more reluctant to commit to a face-to-face-only model?
- Learn how to reevaluate our technological needs for a hybrid online/face-to-face model of tutoring and SI
- Understand what challenges students face in both modes of delivery
Presenter
Dr. Michael Kassel
Training Tutors To Help Tutees With Study Skills & Strategies
Overview
For many students, when they seek out help in our support centers, tutors quickly discover that their area of greatest need is not necessarily the actual course but how to make sense of it to find meaning and relevance. As a result, a tutor's job quickly becomes more of showing students how to learn and less of working with them on what to learn. The best tutors give tutees the techniques and the skills to learn. If this sounds like a challenge for tutors and tutor trainers--it is!A successful and effective tutoring program trains its tutors in helping students to build academic stamina by integrating learning techniques and skills ranging from good study habits to detecting how each student learns best. By showing a student careful reading techniques, note-taking methods, and time management skills, for example, tutors can assist their tutees how to study more effectively, clearing a path for learning.
Now, more than ever, students are struggling with utilizing study skills and sustaining effective academic habits as they are returning to learning in person. According to Ann Denon (Best Colleges, April 2021), studies from the past year have indicated that the shift to online learning damaged students' focus and motivation. Many students have performed worse academically since the transition to remote learning. She suggests that this "learning loss" could be counteracted by living on campus, but that's not possible for all students.
Tutoring centers are now in a pivotal position to help students build academic skills that have regressed, learn college-level study skills, and hone their self-advocacy skills. Indeed, while higher education course content may be challenging, students need support with their study and learning skills and strategies.
Tutors are in a great position to help students develop these good habits, but sometimes they feel less equipped and confident in moving beyond the content in their tutoring sessions to work on these skills and strategies. This session will help tutor trainers better prepare their tutors for working with tutees on study strategies during tutoring sessions.
Objectives
- Reflect on the impacts of COVID on students' academic performance and challenges created by recent years of online and hybrid learning
- Review K-12 literature on re-entry into face-to-face learning and how it can inform higher education practices and programs
- Discuss areas of academic support needed for students to regain their academic stamina and skills
- Discover ways that tutors can engage with students beyond content by focusing on study skills and strategies
- Learn training exercises and practices that better prepare tutors to focus on study skills in tutoring sessions.
- Discuss ways of encouraging tutors to help their tutees overcome potential barriers to learning associated with study strategies
Presenters
Laurie L. Hazard
Stephanie Carter
How Asynchronous Online Tutoring Can Meet The Needs Of Online Students
OverviewDespite recent advances in technology, it can be challenging to meet the unique needs of online students through traditional synchronous tutoring methods. Time zones, schedules, technology limitations, and disabilities can all be barriers to successfully serving online students through synchronous methods. Increasingly, the diverse needs and expectations of online students require a wider variety of options for asynchronous tutoring.
This presentation will examine how asynchronous online tutoring can be employed to meet the needs of online students. As two tutoring professionals at a school with a substantial online-only population, we will draw on our own experiences integrating asynchronous methods into our existing online tutoring program. In this interactive webinar, we will demonstrate the tools, strategies, and technologies that we currently use for asynchronous tutoring, engage the expertise and experiences of our audience, and provide resources for those wishing to employ or enhance asynchronous methods in their online tutoring program.
Objectives
- Examine the rationale for and purpose of asynchronous tutoring
- Understand the differences between synchronous and asynchronous tutoring
- Discover strategies and tools for asynchronous tutoring
Presenters
Kelsey Torgerson
Allison Haas
Intrusive Tutoring: Utilizing Advising, Coaching & Counseling Strategies
OverviewWhile many capable students seek out tutoring to enhance academic success, others inevitably seek help for academic challenges. In order for tutors to effectively assist tutees, particularly those at risk, applying intrusive tutoring strategies are most likely to yield positive results.
Intrusive tutoring draws from other helping professions, such as intrusive advising, to augment and enhance tutoring sessions. Using strategies that draw from the fields of advising, coaching, and counseling will provide critical information about what prevents tutees from thriving. This webinar will help tutors be more comfortable and confident utilizing intrusive strategies with their tutees. The result will be tutees’ increased awareness about the internal and external barriers to their learning.
Objectives
- Examine affective education theory and practice
- Reflect on and critique current training practices
- Explore the role of cognitive development in Mezirow’s Transformational Learning Theory
- Examine Prochaska’s Transtheoretical Model of Behavior Change
- Understand four counseling, coaching and advising frameworks from which to choose various practical strategies for working with tutees
- Discover ways in which to create space in tutoring sessions so that tutees can integrate intrusive strategies into the sessions
Presenter
Laurie L. Hazard
Tutoring Gen Z: How Generational Differences Impact Teaching & Learning
Overview
In higher education, there has been a growing awareness of how generational differences among faculty, staff and students impact the teaching and learning environment. First the Millennials, and now the Gen Zers, have changed the climate in higher education, as institutions have attempted to engage with these students and adapt to their needs. Let’s face it: different generations have different expectations surrounding how we teach and how we learn. Perhaps where these expectations have manifested more than in any other area of the institution is in the learning center.
The learning center is in a unique position to reconcile the differing expectations between faculty and students. As Generation Z brings their distinct needs, desires and skills into our centers, it is increasingly our job to bridge this divide. In order to bridge this divide, we must consider ways that we outreach and connect with Generation Z students so that we ensure they understand the services and programs offered to enhance their academic performance. We must be mindful of the learning preferences and approaches of this generation, so that our practices meet them where they are at, and help them grow as independent learners. And finally, we must consider our Generation Z peer tutor workforce; how do we ensure that they receive meaningful training and that they find the tutoring center to be a positive place to work?
Objectives
- Learn about generational differences and the unique characteristics of Generation Z
- Learn about how generational differences can impact our work in the learning center
- Reflect on how generational differences impact teaching and learning approaches
- Understand how learning centers are in a unique position to mediate between faculty and learners
- Discuss ways to set expectations for Gen Z students to appropriately and effectively utilize our centers
- Define tutoring practices that align with student learning preferences while challenging and promoting intellectual growth
- Consider the role of the Generation Z tutor as an employee and an interpreter, in a way that leverages their support
Presenters
Laurie L. Hazard
Stephanie Carter
How To Effectively Tutor Students With Disabilities
Overview
Working with students who have disabilities can often be intimidating for tutors, especially for undergraduate tutors who may feel that they don’t possess the expertise to support this population adequately. Educating tutors on various disabilities while at the same time helping them develop an empathic understanding that everyone learns and processes information differently can better equip them to help students with disabilities. While there are many theories that can guide practice to train tutors in this area, one effective strategy is to utilize the concept of universal design as a framework to train tutors to work effectively with students with disabilities.
Objectives
- Learn about how to help tutors understand the most common disabilities that college students experience
- Discuss strategies to help tutors develop empathy when working with tutees with learning disabilities
- Develop an understanding of the concept of universal design in learning and of how to introduce the concept to tutors
- Discover tutor training exercises and practices that integrate universal design
- Brainstorm ways for tutors to assess, identify and leverage resources for tutees with disabilities
Presenters
Stephanie Carter