Training Tutors

Today, I finished a strong draft of Reach's Tutor Training Manual. I feel confident in this version, though I would never call it a "final draft" as there is always room for improvement, and we will continue to learn. The creation of the Tutor Training Manual has been a fascinating process - it's so much stronger than it once was. Now, we have a document that will provide our tutors with a basic understanding of literacy development, the tools necessary to create a lesson plan, and the confidence to provide high-quality instruction to younger learners. And, the manual itself is a graphic organizer that will facilitate note-taking and knowledge retention.

The training will occur over a four-day period in the week prior to program launch. On day one, our tutors will get an overview of the program structure. We'll answer all of their questions: How does it work? When do we get paid? How much do we get paid? How can we earn more money? We don't doubt that our tutors will be fixated on this issue in the beginning, so we would like to answer all their questions quickly.

On day two, the tutors will be students. Using an original lesson, I will teach the tutors. They will experience a basic literacy lesson covering all five components of literacy development: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and text comprehension. Using that lesson, we will then backtrack to introduce those five components to our tutors. We will explain each concept, then show the tutors how we addressed them in the lesson.

On day three, we'll use another original poem to walk through the creation of a lesson plan. As a class, tutors will construct a lesson plan while teachers provide guidance and support. We will use whole group instruction to minimize the risk being taken by any individual student in contributing to the lesson plan.

On the final day, the tutors will have the opportunity to practice. We'll break our Lesson Planning Template into five parts. One component at a time, we will give tutors the ability to develop their own ideas for the lesson plan. Then, before moving on to the next component, we will ask two or three tutors to demonstrate how they would handle that part of the lesson. Through this role play activity, students will gain confidence in providing real literacy instruction.

In the end, the goal is to have our tutors leave training with the feeling that they can do this work at a high level. For the first time, I feel confident in our ability, using this manual, to get our tutors to that place.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

Mark