by Erica L. Meltzer | Apr 10, 2021 | Phonics, Tutoring, Tutors
If you’re a tutor who regularly encounters students with reading problems and would like to have more tools to help them, Breaking the Code, the reading-instruction group I co-founded, will be holding a workshop on Saturday-Sunday 2-4:30pm, May 15-16, 2021 (via Zoom).
We’ll be covering a variety of exercises designed to strengthen letter-sound understanding and to improve speed, accuracy, and fluency. These are tools that can be used with students of any age, not just beginning readers, and that can go a long way toward remediating high-school aged students who habitually guess, switch, misread, insert, or omit words.
If you are interested in participating, please email us a brief description of your background and interest at breakingthecodeallways@gmail.com.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Sep 25, 2019 | Tutoring, Tutors
1) Teach real lessons; don’t just go over practice tests
Yes, the amount of time you can spend just teaching material is obviously subject to time constraints; and yes, there is a small subset of mostly high-achieving students who just need to take practice tests and go over what they missed. However, virtually all students in the low-middle score ranges are missing specific pieces of knowledge, and getting taught the material while working through actual questions that involve additional, potentially unfamiliar pieces of knowledge, is often overly taxing for their working memories—there are just too many pieces to juggle. Unless you are very pressed for time, use the student’s diagnostic to figure out what they actually need to learn, and spend some time just teaching it to them before gradually relating it to the test. Repeat for as many concepts as necessary, gradually moving to full-length sections and then tests as students become comfortably with the material.
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by Erica L. Meltzer | Jun 20, 2017 | Blog, Tutoring
Note: I originally posted this article last summer at a colleague’s request, but I’m re-posting it again now as students and families start to look at summer test-prep options.
If you’re just beginning test-prep this summer and looking into take a class or working with a tutor affiliated with a company, please tread carefully when dealing with the free practice tests offered by these organizations.
Many of these companies do not use official material produced by either the College Board or the ACT, but rather rely on tests written in-house and used only by the company. This is always the case for national chains such as Kaplan and Princeton Review, and is common practice among other companies as well. (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Sep 20, 2016 | Blog, General Tips, The Mental Game, Tutoring
After my recent post discussing why it’s not a good idea to treat real SATs or ACTs like practice runs, a tutor wrote to ask me to weigh in on the ACT’s score-deletion option and its effect on the test-prep process. In truth, I probably should have covered it in my earlier post, but since I didn’t (mea culpa!), I’m going to discuss it here.
So first, for those of you who aren’t familiar with ACT scoring policy, the ACT takes the concept of score choice to a level beyond that of the SAT. Most colleges will allow you to select which set(s) of scores you want to send, but a few holdouts — including several Ivy League schools — still require you to send all of your scores. If you take the SAT, you do in fact need to send everything; however, if you take the ACT, there’s still a back door into score choice. (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Sep 14, 2016 | Blog, Tutoring
As I’ve written about before, a number of students I worked with came to me after finding themselves unable to make sufficient progress with other tutors.
When I first met with one of these “second-round” students, the conversation usually went something like this:
Me: Ok, so tell me about what you did with your other tutor. I just want to get an idea where we should start.
Student: Ummm…. (S)he, like, gave me tests to do, and then we went over them.
Me: Did you go over all the questions, or just the ones you got wrong? (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Sep 7, 2016 | Blog, Tutoring
It’s back to school time… which is right about when high school juniors and their parents often start to think about prep options for the SAT or ACT. In recognition of that fact, I’m planning to devote the next few posts to issues involving tutoring and classes: what to know, what to ask, and how to decide which option is right for you.
While there are many factors to consider when choosing a tutor, there are a handful of warning signs that should cause you to run in the opposite direction. As a “second-round” tutor whose students often worked with one or more tutors before me, I had ample opportunity to learn about all manners of ineffective teaching.
I’d like to cover one of the biggest red flags here. (more…)
