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1. Tutors can be effective regardless of their training and education by just giving students more personal attention. However, for a student to achieve better long-term results in the classroom, teacher/tutor education, prior professional experience, and specialized training as a tutor can make a major difference.

 
Professionally educated and trained tutors, who are teaching in their area of subject specialization, consistently produce significantly higher levels of student achievement than tutors who lack this preparation.

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 states “A prepared teacher knows what to teach, how to teach and has command of the subject matter being taught” (U.S. Department of Education, 2005).

To improve your school’s tutoring program, a school or an in-home tutoring company should assign its most educated, experienced, and trained teachers/tutors who are personally highly motivated to act as tutors. Such highly trained tutors have consistently produced the most promising tutoring results. College courses in the skills to be tutored, a degree, special teaching certification and prior teaching/tutoring experience can improve tutoring quality.

A professional tutor is an education expert, a specialist. The professional tutor is not a homework helper. The professional tutor is not a volunteer.

Formal Schools or Home Schools should consider only using tutors who are not the child’s regular classroom teacher. Tutor needs to use continuous feedback to help each student develop a positive self-image as a learner. This is difficult, if not impossible to achieve, if the student’s teacher also acts as the tutor.

2. Tutors need to follow a written curriculum that helps individualize their instruction. They need to record their learning observations in an organized manner and track the gradual development of the student’s new skills class by class.

Tutors or the companies providing tutoring services must design and implement a highly structured tutoring program. This will allow a more thoughtful, sequentially arranged, and systematic presentation of the materials to be tutored. More structuring also helps facilitate administrative quality control and the accurate recording of a student’s learning progress. Such information can in turn be used to provide more accurate feedback on the tutoring program to parents and classroom teachers.

3. Tutors or the companies providing tutoring services need to use diagnostic / developmental templates or tutoring aids to organize and implement each student's tutoring program. These tutoring aids help in the identification of learners with cognitive limitations and in adapting the tutoring to an individual student’s learning differences. By using this approach, the tutor can closely observe and record student learning skills on a class-by-class basis. This will facilitate the diagnosis of specific learning disabilities.

 
4. Tutors must be able to track the session-to-session progress of each student in order to modify tutoring content and use student academic strengths to overcome weaknesses. Tutors can then better track the progress of each student and adjust the pace of remediation as well enrichment as skills are introduced, reinforced, or mastered by the student session by session.

5. Principles of learning drawn from both cognitive and constructivist thinking seem to offer the strongest contemporary tutoring methods.

6. Tutors need to use continuous feedback to help students develop posi¬tive self-images as learners.

Formal Schools/Home Schools should consider only using tutors who are not the child’s regular classroom teacher. Tutor needs to use continuous feedback to help each student develop a positive self-image as a learner. This is difficult, if not impossible to achieve, if the student’s teacher also acts as the tutor.

 
7. Formal/informal assessment needs to be used throughout the tutoring process.
Good tutoring, particularly diagnostic/developmental tutoring closely observes and records student learning strengths and weaknesses on a class-by-class basis. Using this ongoing information, the tutor can better individualize tutoring instruction, using the student’s stronger skills to build up personal learning weaknesses. This precise remedial approach is ongoing throughout the student’s tutoring sessions.

 
8. Mentoring/coaching students (and parents) on “learning how to learn” through providing guidance on study habits, test taking, attention to school, and learning in general is a significant informal part of effective tutoring.

Past research reveals that tutoring is most effective when it helps students (and parents) literally “learn how to learn.” What does this means? It may surprise many people that students often fail to master important basic skills because of subtle undiagnosed learning disabilities, dyslexia, underachievement and other learning issues that may limit study skills.

When a student made progress in “learning how to learn” at home, long-term daily classroom achievement improved.

9. Tutor in the home whenever possible, to maximize long-term student results. One of the researchers, Dr. Edward E. Gordon, compared the result of tutoring done in four different setting: schools, local libraries, community centers, and the student’s home. He says “They found that tutoring conducted in the student’s home yielded the best results.” Tutors were more effective in establishing a learning environment for the student by not only tutoring the student, but also coaching the parents on learning support issues.

 
10. Mentoring/coaching each student's parents on sustaining the day-to-day learning process in the home, especially after each tutoring session ceases, seems an important component of effective tutoring. This mentoring/coaching is an important role for effective tutors.

 
The tutoring companies and tutors need to mentor/coach parents on how to better encourage good study habits and motivate their child’s daily learning at home. Parental support of this process will have a very powerful influence on improving a child’s classroom achievement.
Parents need to be learning role models and more involved in reviewing the student’s work. Tutors were able to help many parents better understand their child’s learning needs and learning abilities.

11. To facilitate the coaching of parents, it is desirable to conduct the tutoring in the student's home outside of school hours. If this is not possible, a community center, school, or library can be used, but the tutors should still try to provide coaching to the parents.

12. Use peer tutors in the classroom to help teachers reduce some of the negative impact of high-stakes testing on classroom instructional time. Peers tutors can help reinforce concepts, practice skills, and support problem solving. Peer tutoring can give a teacher additional time to work more closely with individual students who need re-teaching or practice in less-developed skills.

13. Tutors, throughout the tutoring, must collaborate closely with each student's classroom teacher. The final measure of the effectiveness of the tutoring is the short-term and long-term improvement of the student's daily class¬room achievement.

Today, the challenge of twenty-first-century schooling requires a much broader study and application of tutoring best practices and instructional methods/materials. Tutoring is now at a crossroads. Tutoring can become far more effective by using applied research on what works best. Or tutoring can remain essentially a non-professional, ad hoc activity that uses large numbers of semi-professionals or volunteers who are often ineffective.

We believe at M-ELSE that effective tutoring has made a significant contribution to education. We need to focus on how a new alliance between high-quality, effective tutoring and teaching can better serve America’s students.