Using teams of senior volunteers for literacy tutoring
Abstract
Rather than assign senior volunteers to tutor specific students, the senior volunteers at Jefferson Elementary in Spokane, Washington, rotated tutoring sessions among students — creating a team approach to literacy instruction. Team tutoring can provide greater continuity for students and more scheduling flexibility and strategy sharing among the volunteers. This practice was contributed by Roger Cochran, Spokane RSVP, and Randi Douglas, LEARNS.Issue
Senior citizen literacy tutors are commonly delegated to one-on-one tutee assignments, with each tutor assigned to one or two children. But at Jefferson Elementary in Spokane, Washington, RSVP volunteers decided to try a team approach, sharing responsibility for a group of students.Action
Leadership Team:
The team approach was initiated by a leadership team of three: Jan Charles, a former teacher who provided assistance and expertise in connecting with teachers; Tom Bellinger, a graduate student who provided research on the tutoring system (One-on-One, from New Zealand); and myself, Roger Cochran, promoting the tutoring activity among seniors. We called ourselves the Three Muskatutors and together, we recruited a larger team of 18 tutors who worked with about 26 students as a team. After recruiting, the leadership team functioned as the ongoing presence, with one of us always in the building when the tutoring activities were scheduled.
Family Concept, Family Space:
Critical to our success with this approach was a separate tutoring room, one where the tutors gathered for exchange and a central place where the children came with the tutors who had helped them that day. In our case, the room consisted of four cubicles, each with a table and two chairs, where the one-on-one tutoring sessions took place. A central scheduling board established student schedules and tutor assignments. This central room served as a site for sharing perceptions and strategies concerning the children we served.
Tutors went to the classroom to pick up the students, allowing them to establish a relationship with the classroom teacher. At the end of each student's session, the tutor made notes about activities and progress in that student's file. Then, if a different tutor worked with the student next, notes were always available on the previous session. All tutors working with a student became aware of the efforts and direction of previous tutors. Often plans and strategies were shared during phone calls about individual students, and the leadership team acted collectively as point persons for these conversations. All of the tutors also served as a kind of extended family to our students—each tutor got to know all the students by name, and the children recognized us as a group as well.
We shared tutoring efforts with the children equally, with the agreement that, if a particular child needed the stability of one relationship and attached strongly to one person, we would make an exception and allow that person to tutor the child exclusively. However, during the last school year, not one child seemed to require this stability. Instead, they seemed to thrive on a scheduling system that allowed them to see more than one tutor. One of the benefits of this arrangement was that the tutors were spared some of the stress that can accompany those deeper attachments—the separation anxieties, emotional bonding, and inappropriate expectations that sometimes accompany an exclusive one-on-one relationship.
At the beginning of the year, we all attended a school district training program. But our professional development did not end there. Throughout the year, we exchanged notes about our application and practice, either in the student file, or in a tutor exchange at the end of each day. We regularly shared information on the specific children, their progress, the books we were using, and strategies that worked.
Context
Teams are composed of both RSVP volunteers and other volunteers from the community. Some volunteers, whose now adult children had attended the school, had previously been parent volunteers.Outcome
The main advantages, especially for senior tutors, of this team-based approach include the following:- Continuity: Seniors often have scheduling conflicts—vacation plans, family responsibilities and sometimes health problems—that require their absence. With a whole team minding an individual student, it is much easier to maintain continuity in that child's reading support. When unexpected situations occur, it is much easier to find someone to fill in.
- Behavior Management: Some children present challenging behavior problems and we found that when the entire team could discuss what was happening together, we often came up with the appropriate responses to help that child attend to learning.
- Resource Sharing: The entire team has a greater knowledge of available children's books than any individual tutor, and we helped each other expand our knowledge of good books, appropriate to each child's individual interests.
- Variety and Surprise: The children themselves seemed to like the variety of styles and experience we presented as a team. Since they did not always know exactly how a session might be run, as we each developed our own unique approaches, this surprise factor seemed to add to student interest.
- Improved Tutor Skills: While many seniors learned to read under one basic reading approach, as a team we were able to expand our skills to include reading strategies we did not personally experience. Consequently we were able to connect with current educational practice and lingo through a marvelous exchange.
Posted On
October 2, 2001For More Information