What makes a successful tutor?

Personalized tutoring fills a niche that can’t be filled in today’s schools alone. Tutoring is becoming more common with blended learning more prevalent in local schools like Summit Prep in Redwood City and San Jose. The Gates Foundation is also getting involved in giving grants to innovative online tutoring companies like Tutor.com and Khan Academy. More and more parents and educators are realizing that tutoring gets to the heart of learning, personalizing the meaning and instruction of the subject at hand.

We hire our tutors after carefully vetting them to align their qualifications, characteristics, reference checks and college education philosophy with our vision and values.

• Successful tutors build strong, personal relationships with their students.
• Successful tutors listen and communicate early and often with parents and teachers.
• Successful tutors have specific content expertise and can make learning real, relevant, and rigorous.

And finally, tutors who make learning appropriately rigorous, who make learning challenging enough, but not too tough where students get frustrated and stop trying, the more growth we see in student progress. We found 90% of our students improved their academic achievement as measured by grade improvement, and 71% improved their standardized test scores, with our tutors who were content experts.

Article source - https://www.thethickenvelope.com/2013/08/what-makes-tutor-successful.html