Case Study: Lessons from our small group tutoring pilot in Term 4 2020

Kathryn Sobey, Junior School Principal, Melton Secondary

We started doing small group tutoring in Term 4 2020 because we knew that a lot of our students had faced significant challenges during COVID and we wanted to do everything we could to help them to catch up. It also turned out to be a terrific trial run before the much bigger funded tutoring initiative in 2021.

Our tutoring pilot 

We decided to run our tutoring sessions before school, asking students to come in ten minutes early and to work with tutors in groups of up to five students for 20 minutes during their home room lesson.  This worked well because it was scheduled in for the students and they knew where they were supposed to be. The tutoring focussed on literacy or numeracy, and there were two sessions a week: one was focussed on classroom work that week and the second sessions was more forward looking (giving students head start on work to be done in class the next week).  We asked some of our teachers to run the tutoring sessions, so they knew the content and school culture, and already had relationships with many of the students. 

Lessons learned from our tutoring in Term 4 2020

We found that it was really helpful to have the tutoring formally included in each student’s daily schedule as they knew where they had to be. We also found it helpful to have two tutor groups in the same room, rather than in a quiet space on their own. This is because it helped the tutors to learn from each other, especially in terms of their tutoring engagement strategies, helped on small logistical matters (for example, if a tutor was late or had to step out of the room), and also provided good peer role-modelling for the students (as they could see others learning).

We set up our tutoring well and students were engaged at the start, but attendance really petered out towards the end of term 4. This might have been relating to end of year busyness and overwhelm after a crazy year. But we think it would be helpful next year to work really hard to get the students to ‘own’ their goals at the start of tutoring, and also help them to track their own progress over the course of the term. We think this will help to improve students’ own buy-in and engagement. 

We also think that we could have improved the flow of information between the tutor and classroom teacher. There was a very strong connection on learning content between the tutoring sessions and the classroom teaching. But facilitating more structured, frequent conversations between the tutor and classroom teacher might help identify student engagement issues and their learning progress. 

FInally, we implemented a perception survey at the start and end of the tutoring pilot, using The Tutor Network’s suggested questions - asking the students and the teacher/tutors their expectations of the program, and also how they found it at the end. We didn’t receive as many completed surveys as we had hoped. Again we think this might come back to initial buy-in and engagement. We set up tutoring very quickly in term 4 when teaching was still being done remotely, and teachers and students were quite rightly still focussing on this difficult context. For next year we will spend more time working through the program goals and intentions, and processes like feedback and impact assessments, so as to help ensure everyone is on the same page from the start.