In any literacy program that relies on volunteer tutors, preservice training alone is not sufficient. Preservice training merely prepares tutors for the first few tutoring sessions. Inservice training and onsite support build on a tutor's experiences, answer his or her questions, and help the tutor develop new and more effective skills.
The balance of preservice to inservice training should be flexible enough to respond to the tutors' expressed needs. Tutors in the Bay Area Youth Agency Consortium prefer short, hands-on training sessions delivered in the context of their work to longer preservice training workshops. Other programs report similar experiences. Trainers in the Mississippi Reads program find that, when training begins, tutors do not even know what questions to ask. As tutoring progresses and tutors gain experience, their questions become pointed and insightful.
Within the America Reads programs, ongoing training and support take many shapes. At Brightmoor America Reads Challenge in Detroit, tutor coordinators or reading teachers observe tutors during their first two weeks of service and identify areas for additional support and training. The program reports that this initial observation period is a rich learning experience for both the tutor and trainer. Site coordinators and classroom teachers in Wisconsin Reads provide feedback and strategies to tutors in an ongoing program of support; this approach recognizes important lessons are best learned from the actual tutoring.
Reading Soul Mates in Charleston, South Carolina, holds weekly staff development meetings where tutors and teachers discuss the lessons of that week's tutoring sessions. Tutors in the New Mexico State College of Education program work in groups to prepare lessons and assessment strategies. Roundtable discussions among tutors in America Reads at Fordham University focus on problem resolution, role clarification, and tutoring techniques and activities.
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Photo supplied by Seattle Reads Tutoring Compact |
After tutors begin their work, they often ask for additional training in specific areas. They may want help handling difficult situations such as an uncooperative child, a child with a wandering focus, a disruptive child, or a child who simply refuses to read. Delaware Reads notes that tutors require an ongoing infusion of suggestions. Tutors are hungry for information on concrete techniques, such as how to read with a preliterate child and strategies for sounding out words. Teachers in Wisconsin Reads want their tutors to receive training on pacing, the developmental stages of learning to read, and the importance of flexibility.
Ongoing training must be continually adapted to the needs of each site. For example, an unanticipated training need arose in New York University's America Reads program when tutors asked for tips on working effectively with their supervising classroom teachers. At D.C. Reads, future training topics are influenced by site coordinators' comments from a standardized monitoring sheet used in tutor observations.
Support for tutors can be formal and of general interest, such as the tutor newsletter published by Wisconsin Reads that focuses on inservice topics. Or, it can be informal and personalized: Some programs call each volunteer every week to find out how he or she is doing. At Building Individual and Community Self-Sufficiency Through Service in Sacramento, California, tutors participate in weekly group meetings to reflect individually and learn from other tutors' experiences.
Effective support helps a tutor assess his or her accomplishments, and also provides encouragement and recognition for tutors. Without support, volunteers will soon leave a program. Because a discouraged tutor is a less-committed tutor, America Reads in Muskegon, Michigan, recommends that a coordinator or assistant be on site at all times to deal with problems or answer questions as they arise. Staff members from many programs strongly agree with this approach.
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