Preparing Students To Peer Tutor.

 

We all know that peer tutoring is a great thing to include in the classroom but it is not something you want to just do otherwise one student will give the other the answers.  They will tell you they are tutoring but that isn't it.  To avoid this, one needs to prepare the students so they really tutor.

The first step is to select the students who will be tutors.  You want students who are either good at math or have learned the material well enough to teach it and they should be able to verbalize the process so they communicate well. They should also be willing to be tutors.

Next, one should communicate expectations clearly to both the tutors and those who will be tutored. Expectations should include expected behavior, how the tutoring will be done, what the job of the tutor and tutoree will be so each knows what they will be doing, and the time each session should last.

Speaking of communicating, the tutor needs to be taught how to communicate effectively using techniques such as leaning to ask open ended questions, explain the material, using active listening, and learning to give appropriate feedback.  Giving appropriate feedback can be difficult for teens and preteens.  

In addition, one needs to provide the appropriate materials such as answer keys for worksheets, books, any online resources, whiteboards, etc so the session goes well and the tutor is able to provide the necessary instruction.  One of the last things the teacher should do is to monitor the pairs to make sure the tutor is doing a proper job.

The bottom line is that most students need to be taught how to tutor another student. One way is to provide information on how the tutoring should be done. It is important to show the students how to tutor and what one does during the session.  In other words, we have to train the tutors since they are not teachers.  It is also good  to have students role-play so they learn how to tutor, communicate, and practice giving both corrective and positive feedback.

Another item is to provide tutors with prompts they can use when they need to give feedback should the tutee make a mistake, praise for when they do well, questions to help the tutor guide the tutee to the answer, and questions to help the tutee explain their thinking.  

To help reinforce tutoring expectations, reward system be set up to reinforce the expectations for the tutor.  It might be the tutor gets a ticket every time they do a good job and once a week have a drawing for a small prize.  This should be enough to get started.  Stay tuned for something called reciprocal peer tutoring next week.  Let me know what you think, I'd love to hear.  Have a great weekend.

Green Highlighter Activity

I stumbled across this activity while researching teaching radicals.  I loved the idea and can see using it any class for anything from warm-ups and bell ringers to daily work to exit tickets.  Everything!  With just a small modification, it can be used with digital devices.

I found it on the Simplify with Me and the author modified it from Square Root of Negative One Math.  The idea is pretty cool.

1.  Assign a few problems.

2.  A student finishes the assigned work.  The work is checked by the teacher.  If it is correct, the student is given a green pen or highlighter.  If not the student tries again.

3.  The student takes the green highlighter or pen and goes around to help other students.

4. As other students get the right answer, they receive a green pen and go help others. 

5.  The teacher only looks for those students who have done the problems correctly. 

6.  It is up to the students to help each other until everyone has it done.

7.  Assign a few more problems and repeat.

This is cool in that the students who finish first are given something to do rather than just giving them more problems to do and they get so far ahead that those who struggle never catch up.  I really like this idea.

As far a doing it on digital devices,  You can pick up stylos for cheap on Amazon.  Get a bunch of those and hand them out to the students instead of green highlighters so they can write on tablets.

This can be used for any topic at any time, easy to implement and its not that expensive to pick up several boxes of green highlighters.  This keeps students occupied who finish first and gives the chance for others to get caught up.  It also implements peer tutoring effectively and shifts learning from teacher driven to student driven.

This is cool.  I am off to order multiple boxes of green highlighters so I can start doing it in March. I also have several stylos around for when we used digital devices.