Talking Tutoring: Finding the Right Program

Delia Pompa: With so many options out there, how can you find the right tutoring program for your child? What should you look for? What questions should you ask? Please join me for Finding the Right Tutoring Program, part two of the Reading Rockets webcast “Talking Tutoring.”

Narrator: Funding for the Reading Rockets webcast series is provided by the United States Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs.

Delia Pompa: Hello. I’m Delia Pompa. We Welcome to the Reading Rockets webcast, “Talking Tutoring.” In part one, we discussed the need for tutoring and the options available. Now we’ll talk about the characteristics of a strong tutoring program.

Thank you, Dr. Invernizzi, Ms. Prest, Ms. Hoover, for joining me. Carole, let’s start with you. What makes a good tutoring program? That’s a big question.

Carole Prest: It is a big question. I think it’s a variety of things. We talked a little bit earlier about the qualifications and the group size. But to me, it’s a lot more than that. It’s about finding a tutor that’s a good match for your child. And you have to find somebody who cares, who knows how to relate to your child. But also someone who’s skilled the particular area where you child is the weakest.

So I would make a point of checking into qualifications, but also finding that a really strong personality match for your child.

Delia Pompa: Great. Marcia, back to you. What makes a good tutor?

Marcia Invernizzi: Well, certainly a good tutor must love to work with children. That’s for sure. I think a good tutor must also love to read and be a reader, him- or herself. Because the communication of that love for reading definitely comes through.

So I think a good tutor — it’s very basic, but I think so often overlooked — needs to love kids and love books.

Beyond that, a tutor needs to be very familiar with literacy development and how it is that children do learn to read and how all the components of the literacy diet, so to speak, interrelate. So [understanding of] how the synchrony of literacy development proceeds is of a piece and in accord with a child’s understanding of how the spelling of words or the orthography works to feed their reading fluency and reading comprehension and how all that relates to writing.

A tutor, a good tutor, really needs to have a solid understanding of these relationships. A good tutor needs to know about how to assess these things and how to plan instruction to meet the child’s individual needs. If the tutor him- or herself is not the expert in these things, then whoever is planning the lesson and overseeing the tutoring program certainly does.

I think also the tutor needs to be committed to literacy and committed to putting forth their all into this very intimate relationship.

Delia Pompa: Now we know the good side. Anne, what in your experience are some early warning signs of a poor tutoring program?

Anne Hoover: Well, certainly as Marcia said, the program itself has to be a sound program. And the goal has to be well-defined. Early on, a child works mainly on decoding, figuring out the phonics, learning phonics, sight words, fluency.

And then as they gain those strengths, you want to be focusing on vocabulary, comprehension, and skills that show that the child is beginning to automatize the basic decoding and begin to get meaning out of print. None of these things happen quickly, especially if a student is dyslexic, has a learning disability. It takes time.

But again, we look for signs that things are going well, signs of success that the child is making improvement even if it’s slow, as long as it’s slow and steady. If the child really hates to go to tutoring, then that’s a warning sign. We want to take a look.

Certainly it takes a few lessons for the rapport to build between a child and a tutor. But after a few lessons, if things are not going well, then it’s time to talk with the tutor and perhaps honestly assess whether that’s a good match. It is, as Marcia said, a very intimate relationship.

And it’s important that they like each other. Because they’re going to be working together in this relationship.

Delia Pompa: Should she be looking for a program specifically tailored to a child early on?

Anne Hoover: Oh, yes. Especially once a child has been assessed, you want this to be a program for your child, not one that is used in second grades someplace else or fourth grades somewhere else. It needs to focus on your individual child’s needs and strengths.

Delia Pompa: So Carole, when parents are researching tutoring options, what are some of the questions they should ask?

Carole Prest: I guess I would say that tutoring should not be just a repeat of what goes on during the school day. And so what I would look for is a program that has qualified teachers, certified teachers, college students, or tutors who might provide that role model.

But I look for a program that has academics, maybe has enrichment. It might include, you know, field trips or community service, something that makes it an engaging program that they’ll want to keep coming back to day after day.

The other thing I would say is find one… particularly we work at BELL with children in low-income communities… we would want one that’s culturally relevant. So that the books they’re reading are books that mean something to them.

So in our program, the students, even at a young age, will be reading books about Martin Luther King or Rosa Parks. If they’re English language learners, we have books that are in both Spanish and in English.

So finding materials that engage them. Because they have to learn the skills. But then when they practice those skills, we want them to be with books that bring additional meaning to their lives.

Delia Pompa: Should parents look for some sort of ideal student/teacher ratio?

Carole Prest: Well, I think the lower the better. I mean, I think one-on-one is ideal. However, some students also learn very well by having that peer interaction. So I would say that small groups are definitely better than large groups. I’d say no more than ten to one would be a guide that I would have.

Delia Pompa: You know, the phrase “differentiated instruction” we hear about all the time in the classroom. How does that concept apply to tutoring? I mean, is it about individualized instruction, Anne?

Marcia Invernizzi: Well, certainly even in a small group of three, they won’t be three identical children. Each one will have their own sort of constellation of strengths and weaknesses. And, yes, a good tutor will have to individualize even within a small group. That’s absolutely important.

You know, even if their reading levels are the same, they’ll have slightly different needs in other components of reading. And they’ll certainly have different personality and approaches to the tasks. Different children have different attention spans for certain kinds of tasks. All these individual differences add up to the need for differentiating even within a small group of three.

Delia Pompa: Can you give me an example of a way a tutor might individualize within a small group when she’s tutoring, he or she is tutoring?

Marcia Invernizzi: Sure. Well, let’s say I’m working with a group of three students, all of whom are reading on a let’s say mid-first-grade level. So I know that I can at least plan the same level of text. However, I might know that Anne really likes to read about horses and is totally obsessed about horses. And doesn’t even want to persevere through anything unless it’s about horses.

And I might know that Carole really, really likes to read about Star Wars. And she isn’t going to persevere very long unless I have something about Star Wars. That’s one example.

Another example is even though the three students might be reading on approximately the same reading level, Carole may know all of her short vowels, but might be working on her constant blends in phonics instruction.

Whereas… I don’t know whether I said Anne or Carole in my example… the other student might not know all of the other… all of their short vowels. And so they need short vowel instruction. And so I’m going to have to differentiate that part of the lesson to meet their phonic needs.

Delia Pompa: Does individualizing instruction mean you have to work one-on-one? Or can small groups work? And does the research say anything about that?

Marcia Invernizzi: You can individualize in small groups. There has been research on group size. A study by Elbaum, Vaughn, and I forget the last two authors, but they did a meta-analysis. Which means they study all of the studies that have been done on tutoring sizes. And they compute effect sizes.

And basically what they found was that they did get significantly better effects for the smaller group sizes, particularly groups of three or smaller as opposed to groups of ten. That was their overall significant finding. They didn’t find consistent differences between groups of three and groups of one.

But they were only looking at very short-term tutoring. And among students who were taking off pretty quickly. One of the findings that a researcher by the name of Frank Vellutino has found repeatedly, though, is that students who don’t… you might start off with a group of three who are all pretty similar. But they’re not going to all progress at the same rate.

So as you work with a group of three over time, two of them may really take off. Whereas, one may not. So as over time the need for differentiation grows stronger…

Delia Pompa: So there’s a shift in the patterns.

Marcia Invernizzi: Exactly. And so it may be possible… it may be important, possible, and necessary to reconfigure that group and work one-on-one with a student even more.

Delia Pompa: Right. Carole, does that tailoring of lesson plans and what a tutor does with a child mean that there shouldn’t be a structure to the curriculum that’s used in a tutoring program?

Carole Prest: No, I think using a curriculum really helps you to guarantee that the lessons that the students will be going through is linked to the expectations of the school system or state standards. The other thing is you could easily imagine that a tutor could get so focused on one thing that they go too much in-depth and not enough in breadth.

So I find that by using a standardized curriculum, you can see that all of the items will be covered over the course of the tutoring program and still allow plenty of room for differentiation.

Delia Pompa: So it’s a pacing issue.

Carole Prest: It’s a pacing issue, yes. That’s a good point.

Delia Pompa: Speaking of pacing, how long and how frequent should tutoring sessions be? Marcia, go ahead.

Marcia Invernizzi: As long as they need to be. Sort of… how long is a piece of string? As long as you need it to be. Yeah. In the classic longitudinal study of Frank [Frank] Vellutino’s work again, he started out looking at kindergarteners, following them all the way through fourth grade. The students who were easily remediated took off very quickly, caught up to grade level expectations, and maintained those gains over time, and did so within one semester.

Students who made moderate growth needed more than one semester, perhaps a year or a year and a half. Students who had… who made very slow growth in response to excellent tutoring, one-on-one every day for thirty minutes, really required much longer.

The important thing of that study is that were these findings that led to the conclusion that a student’s response to high-quality intervention, in the form of one-on-one tutoring in this case, should be part of a diagnosis of whether a child has a learning disability.

Because if you don’t include the response to the intervention in trying to ferret out ‘do they have a learning disability or not?’ — you’ll never know what is just the lack of experience or appropriate instruction from what might be cognitive deficits.

And one way you can ferret that out is by providing high-quality tutoring and watching their progress over time. But for the children who are… who do make limited progress, they will need tutoring for a long time.

Delia Pompa: There’s a lot of detail a teacher has to look at when deciding who gets tutored and how long. So what role does assessment play, Anne?

Anne Hoover: Well, assessment is really critical. Everyone wants to know “is this working?” — the tutor, the teacher, and the parent. So a teacher, certainly, and tutor will be using authentic assessment all along the way, even once a week, once every two weeks, reporting on how the child is progressing towards the goal.

And then, of course, we have the more formal assessments that take place in school or when a child goes for a psychological assessment that measures that. And it’s important that the tutor talk with both the teacher and the parent and convey these assessments along the way. So that they will know how their child is proceeding.

Delia Pompa: I see. When you say how the child is proceeding, Marcia, you earlier talked also about how long a child might be in tutoring. How long should it take… how long does it take to see the results from tutoring?

Marcia Invernizzi: Again, assessment is the key. Keeping your finger on the pulse and constantly monitoring their progress in reading, and phonics, and in writing. Both from a decoding accuracy and fluency point of view as well as in comprehension and vocabulary growth, these things need to be constantly monitored.

Not only during the school year, but also for potential loss over the summer. And, of course, if you’re keeping a careful eye on a child’s progress in these areas, then you’ll know how long the tutoring has to be. Because they need it as long as they need it.

And for those few students who do have specific reading disabilities, this maybe throughout their entire schooling.

Delia Pompa: When should you worry if you don’t start to see results? How long should you wait?

Marcia Invernizzi: Well, I think Carole said at the outgo… at the get-go, that we really shouldn’t wait. We should get going as soon as children walk in the door which typically is in kindergarten. Although, certainly there’s a lot of research going on right now in preschool.

But until that time that we have universal preschool, it’s kind of putting the cart before the horse. Certainly providing universal preschool would be a great way, preventative way. But once kids do walk in to kindergarten, we know we have assessments that are highly reliable predictors of who’s going to have difficulty learning to read and who isn’t.

Just plain old alphabet knowledge, for example, and basic awareness of speech sounds like rhyming and beginning sounds, to name two powerful ones. So as soon as we know who has difficulties or doesn’t have that kind of fundamental emergent literacy foundation, we should start working with them immediately.

Delia Pompa: Related to that, Carole, what should a tutor do if the child doesn’t seem to be progressing?

Carole Prest: Well, I think the simplest thing is to try it a different way. Different students will have different learning styles. And so if it’s not working one way, try it a different way. But beyond that, I would say that the tutor should spend some time talking to the classroom teacher. What’s working in the classroom? What isn’t working in the classroom?

Talk to the parent. And then I would say go for help from additional resources. So in our program, we put people through extensive training. There’s ongoing training that they can use to refine their skills. And we hire a lead teacher at every school that they can go to and ask them to observe the tutoring session, give them suggestions, if necessary model different behaviors.

Delia Pompa: But they’ve got support.

Carole Prest: Absolutely.

Delia Pompa: Thank you, everyone. We’ve covered a lot of elements important to a successful tutoring program. But we’ve left a key one for next time — tutor training. We alluded to that. Please join us for part three of this webcast when we’ll be discussing tutor training and specialized tutoring programs.

For more information about how you can help the struggling reader in your life and to watch the rest of this webcast, please visit us at www.readingrockets.org. And while you’re there, please let us know your thoughts about this program. Click on webcast to find our online survey. Thank you for joining us.

Narrator: Funding for the Reading Rockets Webcast series is provided by the United States Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs.