Online sessions, virtual tutoring, “distance learning”—like it or not, this is our “new normal.”
With pandemic changing the fabric of our very existence, many institutions and businesses are switching to various ways of reaching students and customers to stay functional. In NYC, Dallas, and many cities across the country, this week starts the very first week of virtual classes for the educational system. Other cities may have made this monumental change in the last couple weeks, with varying degrees of success.
As I’ve watched a whole city of teachers, administrators, tutors and college counselors scramble to make the switch, I realized something: the way I personally do my job has hardly changed. This is NOT new for me. While I see students in person in my SoHo office, in the years I’ve been helping families target the most selective colleges in the country, I’ve ALWAYS worked online. I’ve helped high schoolers in nine different time zones on SIX different continents nail their target scores and win admission into their dream schools, and I certainly couldn’t have done that if we had to meet in person! Even with families in New York, I use online sessions as a way to maximize busy schedules: from our Ace the Test: Game Plan™ where we formulate our test prep strategy, to our private tutoring sessions where we execute our plan, to my group weekly office hours where I’m on call to answer whatever questions my current lineup of students has that week—all of those things are already online!
From this dozen or so years of experience I have raising scores through a screen, I’ve learned a thing or two not only about how to make virtual sessions more productive (I sometimes get my BEST results from students online!), but also about what DOESN’T work. So I’m here today to share the ins and outs so YOU can make the most of this bizarro time in all our lives…and not let it hinder your dreams to get into your target schools with stellar standardized testing scores! Whether you’re a freaked-out tutor, a freaked-out parent, or a freaked-out student, I hope these best practices from my decade-plus of experience working online help you make the most of our new normal.
If you’d like to talk to me about making a Game Plan to prevent these disruptions from tanking your testing and admissions process, you can reach me here. If you need to navigate this difficult time alone, or with an existing tutor who may not be comfortable with online work yet, then read on!
How are Online SAT or ACT Tutoring Sessions different from in-person Test Prep?
First of all, there’s hope: my students, especially when they’re motivated, often get more accomplished online than off! That’s probably because there simply aren’t that many distractions. You’re staring at each other, on a screen—I’ve found that can be really good for focus and connection.
That said, in a session, you have to be VERY organized—both test prep expert and student must have access to the same materials, including the exact same editions of the same books, to literally be on the same page. If you’re going to work on new material in the session—like homework the student’s struggling with from coursework at school—it needs to be shared almost instantaneously, so one of you (ahem: me!) needs to be tech-savvy, or at least resourceful.
Another part of this “organizational” aspect of online test prep sessions is that the medium lends itself more to correcting homework and teaching new concepts…but less so to DOING work during the session…unless the test prep expert knows what she’s doing! If you’re looking at a screen of your student’s face, and not at the paper they’re writing on, it sometimes takes a second to know when they’ve completed a problem, finished reading a passage, or have written comprehensive notes on what you’re discussing. I’ve had to develop the muscle of being hyper vigilant and reading every expression on my students’ faces to know when to ask when they’re ready to move on: it’s a balancing act to not waste time, but not interrupt their thoughts.
Another odd quality of online tutoring sessions is that when you’re explaining something with your hands, you have to do it backwards! And I find hands—along with intonation and quick but effective drawings—are critical! For example, if I’m trying to use my hand or arm to “charade” how a line’s slope is positive, I have to position my arm so that it appears to go up on the right side to the STUDENT…which is the opposite of how it looks to ME. However, If I’m writing or drawing something on a piece of paper, that can be written the correct way. It’s just that when I hold up my drawing to the camera and then use my finger to point to key items, pointing on the left side of the page will actually be on the RIGHT side for ME.
Probably the biggest difference, however, is simply that you can’t “phone it in”—even if you’re quite literally using your phone! With virtual test prep and tutoring sessions, you have to uphold a certain level of energy to captivate and hold the attention of your student. I’m grateful every day of my background in classical voice (opera, to be exact!), because I can quite literally USE my voice to paint pictures in the mind of my students to get a point across. Online tutoring leans heavily on only audio and visual modes—not kinesthetic, so you have to be able to translate the energy you would have given off to a student were you in the same room, through only those two senses to bring the concept home.
How Do I Get the Most Out of Online Tutoring?
Whether you’re a test prep expert new to distance instruction, or a student or parent worried (understandably!) that this sudden switch is going to disrupt your test-prep groove, these are some basic best practices that will help things run smoothly.
For starters, make sure your electronics are up to par!
I would ideally have two devices on hand: one to be used as a screen only (laptop or tablet), and then a phone. The phone will be helpful for texting pages or problem sets or emailing PDF’s back and forth, as well as for communicating if there’s a connection issue. DO NOT USE YOUR SMARTPHONE AS YOUR SCREEN! You’ll never see the visuals I show you, because it’ll be too small.
Make sure your internet connection is good.
Set yourself up in a place in your home that gets a stable WiFi connection. If possible, try to have your sessions when not everyone in your household is streaming or video conferencing at the same time! If you start to notice an unstable connection, and you can’t get your brother to stop streaming Netflix on his tablet, maybe take your phone off WiFi and use cellular data for that to unburden your internet connectivity.
Actually DO all your homework!
You know what’s worse than starting a tutoring sessions with a student who has nothing to go over, because she didn’t do her homework? Having to improvise because your student didn’t do any homework…online! As I mentioned earlier, turning your virtual session into “classwork” isn’t very efficient for you or your Test Prep expert. Online works out so much better if you can explain and go OVER problems and then teach the concepts behind them, instead of staring to see when your student has finished working on a trig question when you can’t see their page and have to ask what they’ve come up with so far.
Grade your homework yourself BEFORE your session starts.
Grading a practice ACT in person can get done rather quickly. If the student has trouble with the tedium of it, the test prep expert can just take it and grade the whole thing in a few minutes herself. However, if your answers are in your test booklet over THERE, and I’m trying to grade it over HERE… we’ll have to work together. Sometimes this goes seamlessly. Other times, if a student keeps losing his place, this can drag on and eat up precious time in our session. So it’s better to grade your questions as right or wrong beforehand, if possible. If you don’t understand how to then translate that raw score into a SCORE, no problem—THAT can easily happen during our session!
What to Look For In A Tutor or Test Prep Expert for Online Tutoring
A lot of families right now are understandably scared that in the absence of the normal structures of life, test prep will fall by the wayside. If you haven’t had a test prep professional before but know you need one to make it through this with the chance to reach your goals intact—or if the tutor you’ve been working with can’t make the switch to online models—here’s what you should be looking for when you hire a test prep professional for online work. (And if you ARE a tutor scrambling to make the leap online when you’ve never done it before, these tips will help you too!)
A workflow that works.
Many people are just now figuring out how to use my FAVORITE online meeting platform: Zoom. But I’ve used it for over four years! It’s so much more robust than Skype or Facetime (though I always make sure to have those two as backup in the case where a student JUST CAN’T get it to work…though that’s very rare these days). The thing with Zoom is that I can share my screen, take control of my student’s screen (to help them navigate their College Board account, for example, and show them where to click), and have my screen be the main screen they see (when I’m drawing out functions of the coordinate plane to explain something). If you know the ropes, you can do so much with it!
Tons of material at the ready.
Why am I sharing my screen, you ask? Because when I’m going over reading passages or practice tests or problem sets, I have them organized AS PDFs on my computer and pull them up. I highlight with my cursor the key words, and use the cursor as a visual aid to draw my students eyes toward the question we’re going over, so as not to waste time. Also, when I assign homework that’s NOT in the physical books I’ve asked them to purchase—or before Amazon or Barnes & Noble has delivered the books to them—I can still send PDFs of problem sets and practice sections or practice tests to go over. I have a DOZEN YEARS’ worth of materials! And if it’s not on my computer already, I can pretty much instantaneously take a crucial and relevant problem set in one of my many test prep books and use apps on my phone to quickly capture it and email it within seconds. AND, if those aren’t enough, I’ve written FOUR ebooks and THREE courses that I can reference and draw from!
Can hold attention, using visual and audio cues.
As I mentioned before, you have to do more to engage and hold someone’s attention when you’re online. (You have to be entertaining! Or…edutaining?) Otherwise, your student can zone out or even doze off. Using a combination of vivid tonal/verbal melody, rhythm and accents, in conjunction with using gestures (backwards!) and quick, simple drawings are all crucial to get both the visual and audio parts of the brain going. After all, a lot of students learn more visually or auditorily, but utilizing BOTH gives you a bigger likelihood of the content sticking!
Can explain things in multiple ways to make sure material gets through.
Frankly, this applies to ALL learning and tutoring, in real life AND online. Not everyone learns a certain way, and it’s the job of the test prep expert / educator to meet the student where SHE is mentally, and then build a bridge from there to where she needs to go. That requires being flexible, coming up with analogies and examples on the fly, and changing them up the moment you intuit it isn’t landing. This requires TREMENDOUS EQ as well as IQ.
Is resourceful and flexible
In addition to being able to be flexible in the way she explains a concept or strategy, you’re looking for a test prep expert who is resourceful when it comes to hiccups during the session. She can troubleshoot and work around a tech glitch or a missed homework assignment and still make the time together productive. We’re ALL going to need to be flexible in this chaotic moment…but you should definitely be able to trust your test prep professional to manage your session, no matter what comes up.
I hope this helps you understand how to get the most out of the online learning you’re going to be doing for a while now…
…and also how to find someone who can truly help you get the support you need while maintaining social distance! If you need help with the SAT, ACT, choosing between them in the first place—or even for all levels of high school math tutoring—contact me and I’ll get you the help you need.
