Monday, December 17, 2012

Northern Colleagues: a free tutoring program

A few years ago I was looking for a new job online and came across a desperate post from a mom who really needed someone to tutor her daughter but couldn't afford to pay someone very much. I saw many comments sending the mother to drop-in-tutoring programs in town. Personally, I've been a part of those programs and although these places are great for students to go when they get out of school before their parents are done work, it isn't really the ideal place to learn, especially when you're already struggling in an area. Generally, not only are the students drop-in but so are most of the volunteers, and often times there are many more students than their are volunteers. This often creates more of an after-school activity program than a tutoring session for the kids.

I am president of the Student Michigan Education Association at my school. A few weeks before, the rest of the members had been discussing new ways to become involved in the community and also ways they could get more teaching experience.

I decided to create a free tutoring program that would pair education majors with students in need throughout the community. This way students could work with the same tutor each week so that both tutor and student could become comfortable with each other, and the tutor could learn what worked and what didn't work with the student, and would hopefully be able to see progress. This would benefit the kids in the community, their parents, and us education students.

It took over a year for it to get started, but what was suppose to be a student organization is now a student-run program for the school of education at NMU. During the first year we helped 6 students get their GEDs.

You can read more about this program here, and maybe create something similar in your community!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Amazing! Great work :)

daleymachala said...

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