Tenets of Test Prep

Living and working in the 21st century privileges us with options previously unthinkable to prior generations. The schoolmarm in that little, red, one-room schoolhouse never in her wildest dreams imagined that she might be able to teach her students in their homes, her home, her favorite coffee shop, or even from the other side of the globe. Then again, she may have felt that her dedicated learning environment perfectly fulfilled her educational ambitions. How about you? In the midst of an unprecedented array of options, do you consciously align your setting with your intended outcomes? Or do you just work where convenient? ;)

Consider all the choices tutors have today:

IN THEIR HOMES
Working with students in home offers so many tangible advantages that this arrangement shouldn’t just be considered, but actively pursued. Not only do you alleviate the inconvenience of travel time for your student, but, in the case of younger students, you also facilitate a very high level of parent interaction. Plus you may get cookies!

PROS
- highest parent interaction
- familiar student environment
- in-home instruction commands a premium
- no facility costs

CONS
- transportation can be time-consuming
- transportation can be costly
- home environment may be unsuitable for instruction
- scheduling time for student and parent to be home can be challenging

IN YOUR HOME
Some tutors enjoy working amidst all of the comforts of home, as long as they are in their own homes. Creating your own teaching space with all the resources you could want at your fingertips can optimize instruction, while eliminating travel allows for more teaching time. Just make sure you keep your house clean.

PROS
- dedicated learning environment
- minimal facility costs
- potential tax benefits
- no travel time

CONS
- inconvenient for clients
- neighbors may disapprove
- can seem unprofessional

IN YOUR OFFICE
Making the move to an office or learning center is a signal that you are an established educational professional committed to a long-term relationship with your market. Or it may signal that you like to squander money on nonessential facility costs…

PROS
- dedicated learning environment
- very professional
- no travel time

CONS
- high facility costs
- long-term economic commitments
- can be inconvenient for clients

AT AN INDEPENDENT LOCATION
A mutually convenient location like a coffee shop or library can offer most of the benefits of your own office with none of the costs. On the other hand, Starbucks on a busy afternoon is as far from a dedicated learning environment as you’ll find. At least the coffee is always good!

PROS
- can be convenient for both teacher and student
- may have on-site refreshments

CONS
- learning environment may be compromised
- unpredictable
- distracting
- less professional

ONLINE
Working with students live online offers so much in the way of convenience. Unfortunately, much of that value is lost to laggy connections and limited rapport. Capturing the magic of an impactful student-teacher relationship remotely is far tougher than you’d think.

PROS
- extremely convenient for both tutor and student
- allows clients to shop based on quality, not geography
- allows tutor to serve larger or more specific markets

CONS
- learning environment may be compromised
- often requires tech support
- less professional

OTHER
Where else do you tutor students?

11 notes

Happy Teacher Day to all the educators, teachers, tutors, and coaches out there!

The world has no shortage of self-described educators: teachers, tutors, trainers, coaches, administrators, and the like. So why are so many kids suffering from knowledge deficits and remedial skills? One of the issues may be that not everyone employed as a teacher actually teaches.

We’ve all met individuals who excel at their jobs, who surpass all expectations of energy and outcomes. And we’ve all encountered, much to our collective dismay, plenty of duds. Not every attorney or physician or painter or plumber is a master of his or her chosen craft. Some merely underperform while others fail spectacularly. The implications of professional ineptitude or malfeasance vary from industry to industry, but are evident in education: students don’t learn what they are supposed to learn.

A true educator directly facilitates education. Not all educators, however, are teachers. Administrators and deans may perform valuable pedagogical and managerial roles in the educational enterprise, but teaching is done in the trenches. Real teachers, tutors, and coaches transcend the challenges of their jobs to actually transmit specific, intentional knowledge, skills, or strategies in a way that can be assessed or measured after the fact. 

What this means is that, in this sense, managing a classroom or keeping records does not make you a teacher. Being a terrific role model doesn’t make you a teacher. Getting a degree, license, or certification doesn’t make you a teacher. In fact, being employed as a teacher doesn’t make you a true teacher. Only teaching makes you a teacher.

Teaching isn’t easy. In fact, many professional educators might argue that the demands of their occupations leave little time for true teaching. But trouble with TINOs (Teachers In Name Only) exists far beyond the intractable environs of public education. Every for-profit educational enterprise, particularly those that specialize in test prep, needs to distinguish true teaching from activities that look like education but fail to transmit actionable, measurable knowledge, skills, and strategies. If we can find a way to let true teachers teach, we’ll all be better off!

It wasn’t pretty… http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/Document-Deep-Dive-What-Was-on-the-First-SAT-202748151.html

I like the commentary about this terrifying test on Buzzfeed. 

Somehow, Sylvan Learning is teaming up with The Princeton Review to offer Princeton Review SAT test preparation courses and diagnostic tests this summer at select Sylvan Learning Centers. The details are here, but since this is just a pilot program, the implications are more interesting. Is this an unholy alliance, a doomed partnership, or a sublime synergy? What do you think? 

A guarantee, particularly a money-back guarantee, can be an excellent sales tool. Prospective clients can see a guarantee as an insurance policy against their most feared outcomes. You would think, then, that most tutors and test prep professionals offer some sort of guarantee. But that isn’t always the case.

The retail giants of test prep offer an array of infamous guarantees. The standard is the offer of money back IF you can prove you attended all the classes and did all the homework. Having worked in the trenches, I can assure you that this particular guarantee is mighty tough to collect on. 

The other notorious guarantee is the offer to repeat a class if you’re not happy with your results after your first time through it. Need I explain why that offer isn’t much of a deal?

Guarantees of refunds or free services make a lot of sense for large retail companies that have the budget to absorb a certain percentage of returns as a cost of doing business. Allowing students to repeat classes for free also becomes more manageable when you have an acceptable number of paying students in the class. But do these policies make sense for smaller operators and tutors?

The main problem lies in the distinction between products and services. Money-back guarantees on products are much easier to manage because customers are usually required to return the product to exercise the guarantee. If you buy my widget and don’t like it, a return is not the optimal outcome, but at least I can resell my widget to someone who might appreciate it. 

Offering a guarantee on services, on the other hand, means that the customer ends up with the service and the money, while the service provider retains nothing but bad feelings. Such a guarantee becomes particularly pernicious when predicated on subjective measures of satisfaction rather than measurable results. Just announcing that you will offer an additional two hours of instruction to any client who is not completely satisfied opens the door to a lot of unpaid instructional hours. There’s a reason why many of the classic test prep guarantees are invalidated by any increase from baseline (and why some operators use creative strategies to get that baseline as low as possible!)

My questions for the private tutors and teachers out there are these:

1. Do you offer your clients a guarantee? What kind?

2. If you offer a guarantee, why?

3. If you don’t offer a guarantee, why not?