Dear Colleagues,

“Jamie” has made great overall progress during tutoring sessions. Much of this progress can be attributed to her strong work ethic and the attention that she places in her studies. Combined with her smart, creative, and caring personality, Jamie has all the attributes of a model student. While most sessions revolve around homework support, she has also learned many new strategies that she uses on a daily basis to complete her work in a way that fosters understanding. While Jamie certainly benefits from the 1:1 support of tutoring sessions, she deserves much credit for taking on the overall responsibility for her learning and strong grades. Her personal growth in academics, particularly in math, is a testament to this.

During tutoring sessions, as a learner, Jamie has shown strong skills at processing and relating information, particularly through three areas: interpersonally (person-to-person), kinesthetically (movement-oriented), and intrapersonally (involving self-awareness). She has thus been most productive when asked to complete such activities as: 1) talking with someone through a given topic or idea, 2) rewriting ideas so as to learn them and/or process information through movement (building models, walking around the room while spelling, etc.), and 3) creating a personal reflection in relation to an idea or set of ideas and/or use her feelings or personal reflections to help her connect to concepts. In light of these attributes, Jamie has used these strengths to develop productive strategies that can best support her learning. For instance, she makes study guides for tests that first require her to write all the material and then have someone test her in a way that resembles conversation. She also connects personal associations to words or concepts that help her to recall the information in a way she can remember and process. Strategies like these have significantly helped Jamie achieve academic success, as well as process and retain more of what she learns.

While Jamie has had many successes over the last year, one theme that has emerged as an area of challenge for her is math. One of the reasons for starting tutoring sessions in the first place, this theme was introduced last year and has been echoed presently by her current advisor (as reflected by her teachers). In particular, this feedback relates that the conceptual aspects of the work have caused Jamie difficulty; particularly those problems that require multi-step, abstract processing. These difficulties have also evidenced themselves on occasion during tutoring sessions, for example in the following manner:

Jamie often works quickly. While this action is not in itself a quality that impedes learning, for Jamie it can cause difficulties. Working quickly has caused her to copy numbers incorrectly and make careless mistakes in her calculations, particularly when completed in her mind. These inaccurate calculations can take the form of basic operations computed incorrectly, or Jamie jumping immediately to an answer that is familiar to her instead of taking the time to think it through. In math, a discipline that requires notation to be precise (copying numbers correctly, aligning place values, etc.), once one step is "off" in an equation, all subsequent steps are thrown off as well, resulting in an overall incorrect answer. During cases like these, it is not necessarily that she misunderstands a concept, but rather that these errors can either lead her to a developing confusion, or just provide her with an incorrect answer. As an example, Jamie might calculate 6 to the second power as 12 (6 x 2), as opposed to 36 (6 x 6). However, if you were to ask her the concept behind exponents, she would be able to describe it to you correctly.

In terms of the mathematical process, Jamie has shown skill in remembering and understanding the steps needed to compute numbers correctly. However, she does benefit from reinforcement during the beginning stages of a new topic’s introduction. It is important during these stages that Jamie work slowly, and have the opportunity to build her new knowledge in a context that scaffolds the ideas. When not supported at the onset, gaps that occasionally emerge in her learning can impede J’s understanding of a complete process. Due to these types of errors, Jamie has arrived at tutoring sessions feeling like she has followed what was taught in class correctly but cannot understand why she got an incorrect answer. Accordingly, during tutoring sessions, in addition to reviewing an abstract framework of a process for clarification, Jamie has also learned to move slower through the supporting steps, and write out all of her work. Through notating her work with various diagrams and graphic organizers that help her to organize and process, she has minimized careless errors and kept her work organized. These techniques have been very helpful tools for Jamie to use. She now arrives at correct answers and understands the more abstract, conceptual frameworks by making their principles more concrete and something to which she can latch on.

In the past, it has been helpful to know of Jamie’s work ahead of time; tutoring sessions can be used to provide a preliminary context in which to frame new learning. An awareness of how a concept is being introduced and what strategy and techniques are being used has also allowed for direct support of those instructional elements during sessions. Additionally, conversation with teachers in the past has also been helpful to target problem areas. Understandably, any collaboration in this regard has proven to be another potential support to Jamie’s learning and would be highly recommended.

Jamie is an intelligent, hardworking, and caring individual. In my work with her over the course of this past year, I have watched her grow tremendously through her studies at your school. I look forward to supporting this great work she is doing as best I can as this year progresses.

Sincerely,
Matt Aborn
Housecalls Tutoring