Best Practices for Tutoring Centers
Fostering Transparency
-
Set clear expectations about how the team will use the tool
-
Have a clearly documented process & ensure all team members know it
-
Maintain a single point of truth
Leadership Values
The administrative demands of running a tutoring center can easily take over a coordinator's job, crowding out the experiences that probably got us into the position: one-on-one tutoring, mentorship, and a love of learning. While the drudgery of email might seem like the price we have to pay, it not only takes up our time but impacts the way we work with our tutors or peer educators.
Where email reigns, coordinators are pushed to task managers: identifying, distributing, and following up on the work of the center. I knew this wasn't the kind of leader I wanted to be, but I needed the tools to foster the transparency and collaboration my team needed.
Leadership with Transparency
-
Share knowledge
-
Collaborate
-
Pursue continual growth
-
Produce excellent content
-
Improvise with creativity and innovation
Team's Purpose
-
Offer mentorship
-
Promote transparency
-
Empower collaboration
-
Foster autonomy and self motivation
-
Facilitate professional development
Coordinator
Leadership with Email
Transparency Tools
These apps help me empower my tutors so as a coordinator, I can focus on the kind of leadership that I value: creating meaningful professional development for my team, finding ways to streamline and simplify tasks, gathering great data and compelling stories about the work we do, and pursing our strategic plan.
Making the shift from the email command center to an open, collaborative system might seem scary. While it can be tempting to imagine the worst case scenarios of sharing the reins with your team, there are ways you can mitigate these risks. Also, as a leader of undergraduate students, slip ups with professionalism and communication can become important opportunities for mentorship and coaching, to help our team be more successful in the job market.
Ultimately, giving your team more power to take ownership of their work can increase job satisfaction, a sense of their value as tutors, and more ambition to tackle problems in new ways. But in order for your team to succeed, you need to set clear expectations about how your team will use these tools.
Overview of DigiComm's Trello Board: all of our projects, owners, files and due dates available to all team members.
An individual Trello Card: illustrates members, checklist, due date, and reminders.
Canva makes it easy to create promotional material for social media. You can import your own pictures and then use the Canva layouts to create a beautiful design.
Overview of DigiComm's Trello Board: all of our projects, owners, files and due dates available to all team members.
Examples
Internal Communication
Slack offers the end of email, so it’s important to use it for all communication. You don’t want your team searching through Slack and email. Push your team to keep all of their communication on Slack.
Because Slack has a mobile app and notifications, it’s a middle ground between text and email. Set expectations about how professional you want your tutors to be in their online communication, write clear purposes for each of the channels, and ensure that tutors are trained to use Slack effectively.
Project Management
Trello fosters transparency and ownership with your tutors: know who is responsible for tasks, set deadlines, enjoy automated reminders, and easier communication.
Everyone on a Trello board has editing capabilities. Trello should function as the single location for all information regarding a task. For effective task management, each card should ideally have: members, a description, and deadline
Promotion & Brand
Canva can make anyone feel like a graphic designer. Easily import your own images and use Canva's layouts to create beautiful and professional graphics for social media, promotional content, and events.
There are many opportunities to create content that you have to pay Canva to use, however with a little extra time and attention, you can use this site without having to pay a cent. All of our best practices below involve free features for Canva.
Want to find out if these communication tools will work for your center? Try them out with us! Sign up now and use it through the conference to see how they work. Download the app for your phone for the full experience.
Fill out this google form and we'll enroll you in the actla2016 Slack Team and/or the ACTLA Trello Board. Keep an eye out for an email invite (check your junk mail if you don't see it!)
Let's try them out!
ACTLA Trello
ACTLA Slack
Coordinator
-
Command center: create and prioritize tasks
-
Distribute information
-
Navigate schedules
-
Coordinate events, presentations, etc.
-
Direct team to resources and needs
Team's Purpose
-
Complete assigned tasks
-
Reply to emails quickly
-
Be on-time to shifts
-
Communicate changes to supervisor
-
Carefully read all emails and policies
