Udelson Tutoring provides a holistic, process-driven approach to tutoring and test prep. Teaching the strategies and skills that build independent learners ensures that students boost their confidence, stimulate their curiosity and, of course, raise their scores and grades. Sessions take place over Zoom, through which students can access an online whiteboard, Kami, Kindle, and IXL, keeping sessions engaging, dynamic, and effective
How is your course different?
- Most tutors focus on tips and tricks under the guise of “strategies.” These courses may occasionally provide content remediation, but only to the extent that it is “absolutely necessary” in the eyes of the tutor.
- Strong tutors deliver a full content-based curriculum, and they are wise for it: by the time students are studying for the ACT/SAT, for example, many have forgotten what they’ve learned in school about basic grammar and geometry, for example.
- The best tutors, however, do much more:
- Great tutors see themselves not as purveyors of test-prep but rather as educators teaching lifelong skills and mentors developing meaningful relationships.
- They understand that test-prep tricks amount to little more than a couple points here and there on low-hanging fruit and don’t benefit the student’s long-term capacity to learn.
- Great tutors are able to quickly pivot between process-oriented instruction and content remediation where it is needed.
- Great tutors know that beneath correct answers may lie misinformed processes, and they know how to identify those processes by helping students make their invisible thinking processes visible.
- Moreover, great tutors understand that the best, thought-provoking questions are those for which there is no singular “right” answer.
…Okay, so, how is your course different?
Three major ways:
- Other courses rely on preventing the inevitable, whereas we will rely on anticipation of the inevitable. Mirroring a common occurrence in school, most test prep and tutoring courses aim to arm their students with the content knowledge to answer every question correctly. While that aim is important and well-intentioned, it only works to an extent, if it works at all. Why? Because it assumes that breakdowns don’t happen. But, breakdowns are inevitable, even for the strongest students.
Here are just some of the ways that students experience breakdowns during exams:
- Breakdown due to boredom.
- Breakdown due to an unknown vocabulary word.
- Breakdown due to an unfamiliar concept.
- Breakdown due to memory breach.
- Breakdown due to anxiety.
- Double Breakdown: breakdown due to any of the aforementioned, compounded by the student not realizing they’ve broken down.
As opposed to crossing our fingers and hoping that none of these breakdowns happen, I prepare students with the tools to 1) accept that breakdowns will happen, 2) recognize breakdowns as they happen, and 3) repair them in real time.
2. I blur boundaries between exam sections and school subjects. One of the biggest causes of student disengagement is when they feel detached from the material they’re learning: they’re left to believe that the information they learn in one section cannot possibly be applied to anything else, so they feel they must be prepared to take a number of distinct exams equal to the number of distinct subjects tested. Other test prep and tutoring courses follow this philosophy. As opposed to dividing our course into subjects, my course progresses according to skill sets, which students learn to apply and adapt to flexibly across all their classes and standardized test sections, as well as in other academic pursuits in school and beyond.
3. I teach students, then I teach the test. While there is content knowledge necessary to achieving a high score on exams, my primary focus is on teaching my students not what to understand but rather how to understand. As the course progresses, the burden of responsibility will gradually shift from tutor to student so that students become in charge of their own education. I recognize that long term student success is attained when students focus on asking, not answering, questions. This way, student success is measured by the extent to which they can teach themselves.
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Udelson Tutoring 