We asked our Director of Academic Operations Gretchen to share her insights into how we train LogicPrep tutors to teach in a one-on-one setting, both from our office and online. Gretchen’s goal in training new tutors is simple: teach our team members how to provide the best learning experience possible for each student.
Our team members have been meeting with students and their families online for over a decade. In fact, half of our lessons any given week are online! To some extent, best practices for delivering online lessons are the same as best practices for delivering in-person one-on-one lessons. Read why online learning with LogicPrep is just as smooth as sitting in the same room with your tutor.
We make it interactive
Making a lesson interactive is a key part of any one-on-one lesson, be it in person or online, but it’s even more important when the tutor and student aren’t in the same room. This serves multiple purposes: it keeps students engaged and interested, it makes it easier for tutors to detect if the students are tuning out or lost, and perhaps most importantly, it gives us more information from which we can tailor their lessons to our students’ needs. The more we can get students to talk and share, the more we understand what they know, what they don’t, what they’re confident with, and what they’re unsure about.
How do we make our online lessons interactive?
We use leading questions to get students to discover new information (or to guide them to solve problems themselves) instead of just explaining the concept/doing the problem for them.
We always use this guideline when training new tutors: Whenever possible, try to get your students to talk more than you do. It’s not a lecture, after all!
We use GoogleDocs or other interactive measures to collaborate with our students in their learning. To see this in action, check out the video below form our expert tutor Adam:
We make it visual
This is important to do because not all students are auditory learners, and it is really important for them to see what is being taught to them (rather than just listening to what the tutor says/explains). In person, this is second nature - we draw on the paper or on the whiteboard tables, we underline key phrases in passages, we circle things that students should be paying attention to. In an online environment, conducting a visual lesson requires the use of some technology, which is well worth it.
How do we make our online lessons visual?
First and foremost: We share our screens! Most video conferencing platforms have this function, and it’s super important for tutoring. Even if we’re simply going through a test with a student, sharing the screen helps to keep the students from flipping between different tabs and jumping ahead.
We use tablets, especially for math lessons, to “write” on the screen -- annotating the test/worksheet, doing the work out for a math problem, underlining key phrases in a reading section, drawing pictures to illustrate a new concept -- you name it! This is a great alternative to the whiteboard tables that we have in the office, and sometimes, we even use this technology in person (when looking at a problem on the computer screen, etc.). To see this in action, check out the video below (or here!) from one of our experts, Jamie!
One way we sometimes make math more visually engaging is to have the students explain what they would do/did to solve a problem and write out their steps on the screen as they’re speaking (rather than just having them do a problem on their own and tell us the answer at the end). Not only does this lead to a more visually engaging lesson, but it also gives us more information about whether the student is solving the question in the most efficient way, where they might be getting caught up, etc.
In math lessons, we use calculator simulators so as not to neglect the ways that students can and should use them on the tests.
We make sure our students are with us
It’s important to speak clearly (and not too fast). To enunciate. To make sure our students understand before moving on. This element of online lessons goes hand-in-hand with making it interactive -- if we’re leading a truly interactive lesson, it’s much harder (if not impossible) to leave a student behind. This is one of the real benefits of one-on-one lessons; classroom teachers don’t always have this luxury.
We “bookend” what we’re teaching
In order for the information and strategies that we give students to stick, we find it’s important to give them the lay of the land -- share what we’re planning to cover and why it’s relevant in the beginning, and summarize the lessons we want our students to take with them at the end. Better yet, we make that end-of-lesson summary interactive -- asking the student what they learned and what they’re taking away, and using the opportunity to review what stood out to them and reinforce what didn’t.
We acknowledge and overcome the challenges
Of course, there are some challenges to teaching online, especially in a group environment. For one-on-one lessons like ours, there are two main elements of teaching that the online environment makes slightly more difficult:
Effectively reading students’ body language, facial expressions, etc. to accurately assess when they’re understanding something, when they’re confused, when they’re checked in and paying attention, or when they’ve tuned out (and pivoting the lesson accordingly).
Holding the students’ attention when so many tempting distractions (Instagram, iMessage, WhatsApp, etc.) are just a tab away.
To overcome these challenges, in addition to amplifying our efforts in our normal best practices for teaching (above), we also keep the following adjustments in mind for online lessons to make the experience as effective and engaging as possible:
We are even more animated than usual. Hand motions, gestures, varying intonation and volume of voice -- we put a little extra effort into making it exciting.
We make it smooth! We recognize the importance of maintaining as much normalcy as possible by delivering lessons in a calm environment and making sure that we connect with our students easily.
We always make sure to work from a quiet and professional environment: where we have a background clear of any distractions, where we won’t be interrupted by others during our lesson, etc.
We ensure that we have a strong, stable internet connection (super important for online lessons)!
We use headphones to reduce any feedback or background noise.
And there you have it. No huge secrets here -- just some extra concerted efforts to make sure the online learning experience is just as interactive, engaging, interesting, and fun as our in-person lessons are. To learn how to make the most of your own experience, click here!
We’ll see you all online soon!