Session Efficiency Updates

Hi all,

We hope you’ve had a fantastic week! It’s been exciting here on our end after hosting a webinar with EdWeek about addressing unfinished learning in math. One of our panelists, Keisha Pierre-Stephen, is a teacher at one of our schools. She had effusively positive things to say about the work that you all do and had an excellent story about a student who went from struggling to thriving in her class last year as a result of your tutoring!

You can watch a recording of the webinar here.  From 30:00-33:00, you can hear Keisha’s story.

As always, thank you for the impact you’re having on our students!

Response times have gone down

We are continuing our focus on session efficiency in the coming weeks. We’ve made progress recently with reducing average response times. They decreased by approximately 20% since we set out to tackle the issue a few weeks ago! Fantastic job.

While we know that response times are only one way of looking at session efficiency, it’s a great place to start. 

In addition, we wanted to share some strategies (below) that we’ve seen consistently work well in session. TQMs will be looking for areas where tutors can better implement these strategies and others. As a result, you will see more frequent and specific feedback in session reviews moving forward.

Ways to improve efficiency

Use clear images rather than explaining

Issue: Tutors explain concepts or procedures on the spot. It results in imprecise language or hard-to-follow explanations. Students then get confused and have a hard time applying the concept to their problem.

Solution: Use concise, crisp visuals from Google Images to explain concepts. It takes less time than explaining, it prevents you from saying the wrong thing, and you can use the annotation tool to highlight what’s most important.

Complete the problem on your own

Issue: Tutors take too long to recognize mistakes in students’ work. The student ends up having to redo large portions, which is frustrating and takes more time.

Solution: While the student is working on the problem, do the work yourself in a side application like Desmos, Geogebra, or Microsoft OneNote. This makes it easier for you to check the student’s work as they share it because you can hold it side-by-side with your work. You’ll more quickly recognize their mistakes.

Occasionally send students a snapshot of all work completed so far

Issue: Many of our students struggle to organize and keep track of their work. They either do it in their head or only partially show each step on paper. As they get further into a problem, they forget what they’ve already done and where they are in the process.

Solution: For these students, occasionally share the work that you’ve done so far by cutting and pasting it into the whiteboard. Tools like LightShot are fantastic for quickly cropping and annotating screenshots. Make sure that you share not just the step that the student is currently working on, but preceding steps as well.

This is a great example of a session where Mr. Varma uses the whiteboard to send a running log of work done on the problem.

Messaging issues on the platform

We’ve done some preliminary investigation about messaging issues on the platform. Particularly, messages seem to be disappearing or appearing on a delay. We know that this significantly impacts the session experience and can be frustrating for tutors.

This week, our engineers built a mechanism to more accurately track when this is happening and the details behind why. We’ve learned that this issue is likely happening in about 10% of sessions. With this new data, we should be able to dig to root causes more quickly and resolve the situation soon.

Thanks for your patience with this. The best way for tutors to help is always report session issues using UserSnap in the moment they occur. We know it can be challenging to do this while tutoring, but it gives us the best information possible in order to fix the issue.

Session Efficiency and General Updates

Hi team,

This is another packed NewsFeed post. I strongly recommend setting time aside to read each section carefully. Please reach out with any questions. Have a great weekend! 🙂

Session Efficiency

Over the years, we’ve spoken to thousands of students, teachers, and parents about their Yup experience. We consistently hear that the “speed of the session” is one of the most important aspects of the experience. In 80%+ of instances where customers leave Yup, they cite “slow sessions” as the reason.

Over the last 3 months, we’ve made incredible progress in this area by making changes to our rubric and eliminating unnecessary work at the end of each session. Since implementing the new rubric on July 12, we have reduced average session length by 50% from 47 minutes to 33 minutes! Congratulations on your hard work! All of the rubric changes came directly from tutor input.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Moving forward, we’re looking to make additional gains in session efficiency by reducing the average response time of our tutor base. The average tutor response time is 20 seconds for the month of November. We aim to reduce this to 17 seconds by the end of 2021.

 

 

 

 

 

 

We are aware that technical bugs and message delays have recently caused these numbers to increase. Please note that our engineers are hard at work fixing this. Please continue to send reports of issues as they occur through UserSnap. This provides our engineers with the information to directly address the issues that you are experiencing

Tips for increasing session speed from some of our strongest tutors

But how can we speed up the Yup experience without compromising our high standards for learning?

We took a look at tutors with the following characteristics:

  • Rubric score avg > 9.7
  • Avg session length < 35 min
  • Avg response time < 15 sec
  • Student ratings > 95%

And asked them for their strategies for keeping sessions speedy while delivering sound educational outcomes. We’ve compiled some of their responses here: Strategies for Improving Session Speed.

Please review the above and let us know if you have any feedback or if there are ways that we can make it easier for you to implement these strategies!

Slow Response Times

In order to better understand when tutors are responding slowly and could benefit from the above strategies, we will be changing some of our session tags.

Currently, we have 3 slow response tags that you may have seen applied to sessions:

  • Slow Response Time – applied by TQMs; very rarely used
  • Slow Response (minor) – auto-applied if maximum reply time is between 2 and 5 min
  • Slow Response (major) – auto-applied if maximum reply time is >5 min

Only the first one influences monthly bonuses via our professionalism metric for tutor tags.

Moving forward, we will be removing the three tags above and implementing a single slow response tag that auto-applies if avg_tutor_response_time is above 30 seconds for a session.

General Updates

Yup Webinar

We’re so excited to announce that Yup is hosting a Webinar with Education Week and leaders from Yup Math Tutoring, Zearn, National Student Support Accelerator, and Math Motivators as we discuss “Addressing Unfinished Learning in Math: Providing Tutoring at Scale.” 

Our panel includes:

At Yup, we strongly believe that tutoring can be a primary solution in combating learning loss and engaging students. We’ve seen firsthand the impact that each of you has on our students when they get a session with you. We’d love for you to join us and be a part of the larger conversation that we’re having around providing tutoring at scale.

If you’d like to register and attend, please do! If you know any teachers, school leaders, or administrators who might be interested in attending, please reach out to Kreg and put us in touch.

TGP Levels and Student Ratings

We’ve updated these in Tutor Workbooks! Congratulations to everyone who has moved up levels in the last few months. 🙂

We will also be raising our professionalism threshold for student ratings from 80% to 85% for each month. We feel that this is a reasonable threshold that nearly all tutors are consistently able to maintain.

Shift ending and overtime

Quick reminder about our new overtime and shift ending policy:

  • Tutors must be free up to 30 mins after a given shift in case of a longer session. As such, tutors should avoid taking on shifts if they will need to leave directly after. This applies to shift takeovers, temporary shift additions, and set weekly schedules.
  • Tutors can work with the student for as long as the student likes during this time.
  • If you need to leave an overtime session, please notify the student 15 minutes before your 30 minutes of overtime are going to end.

For specific examples, see here.

Checking to see if students want to do additional problems

We are still seeing a large number of sessions where tutors are not checking whether students would like to work on an additional problem. As a reminder, here is an easy-to-follow process for ending the session:

  • After finishing a problem, ask the student if they have another problem they’d like to work on
  • When the student does not have more problems to work on, ask if they’d like you to create one for them (e.g. “Got it! Would you like me to provide a similar problem so that you can get extra practice?”)
  • Emphasize that there is no pressure to stay (e.g. “No worries if you have to go!”)
  • When the student wants to leave, offer a friendly goodbye and words of encouragement (e.g. “Great work today! It was a pleasure working with you :)”)

Please note that TQMs will be marking “No” for rubric strand E3 in any sessions where tutors are not following the guidelines.

Yup Updates

Thanks so much for your continued work to support our students!

Tutor team,

Here’s a quick note from a school that recently started a partnership with us:

I just wanted to give you a quick feedback about YUP. I had a student enroll and this is what she wrote this morning:  

‘I’m trying to keep up and not fall behind but so far I think I’m understanding the math with the help of Yup…Yes, I was stuck on a problem and I couldn’t quite figure out or understood what I had to do so I went on yup and went through the problem step by step’

As a teacher, it is so rewarding to know that we can offer resources to students that actually WORK and HELP!!!! Thank you so much for making this available to our students. I KNOW it will make all the difference in the world, for so many! Thank you, Thank you, Thank you!

The work you are doing makes a difference for both our students and teachers. Way to go!

Keep providing input!

Today’s NewsFeed post is a bit longer than usual, but it covers important topics that tutors and students have been bringing up over the last few weeks. 

Remember – your feedback improves the Yup experience for everyone. Changes and guidance below are a direct result of tutors sharing their input.

Please read carefully, and DM Kreg if you have any follow-up questions!

Ending your shift while ensuring the student feels heard and supported

We have heard recent feedback from tutors that they’re not clear on how to end their shift or finish an overtime session in the smoothest way possible. Thank you Alhassan, Pralhad, and Josh who recently brought up some of these issues!

Students have also expressed frustration when a tutor abruptly tells them that their shift is over or when the tutor only helps them for a few minutes before logging off.

We think that some of these issues are a direct result of our policy stating that tutors should not begin working on a new problem once their shift has ended. For example, a tutor may start a session with a few minutes left in their shift, do a problem with a student for 7 minutes, and then say that they need to log off.

As a result, here is our new policy:

  • As always, please ensure that you have 30 minutes after the end of your shift to work with students. You will still be paid 1.25x your rate for any time spent in session.
  • If you want to stay longer than 30 minutes, you may do so. You will be paid for all of the time spent in session. For example, if your shift ends at 2:00pm, and you receive a session at 1:55pm which lasts until 3:00pm, you will be paid 1 hour of overtime at 1.25x your rate.
  • If you are in a session with a student at the time your shift ends, we will now require that you stay for the full half hour after the end of your shift, even if that means starting a new problem. 

If you do need to leave, we recommend giving the student a heads up 15 minutes before your shift is going to end.

  • “Just a heads up that I have about 15 minutes left in my shift. I’m confident that we can get through this problem before then!”
  • “Before we keep going, I just wanted to let you know that my shift will be ending in 15 minutes. But that should be plenty of time to get you started on this next problem.”

Emergency response tutoring

Similar to the above policy for ending your shift, guidelines for claiming an Emergency Response Tutor session will be:

  • Ensure you have at least 30 minutes to work with the student. You will be paid 1.25x.
  • If you want to stay longer than 30 minutes, you may do so. You will be paid 1.25x for the entire length of the session.
  • If you know that you’ll have to leave at a certain time, let the student know 15 minutes in advance.

Ending the session on the student’s terms

We’ve gotten recent student feedback about navigating the end-of-session experience. Particularly, some tutors are still not checking whether the student wants to try another problem and others are asking in a way where the student still feels pressure to stay. It’s extremely important that students have a choice for what happens after finishing each problem.

Please take a moment to review this short guide on how to end sessions on the student’s terms.

Increasing session speed

One of the most common indicators of Thumbs Down session ratings is the speed of a session. Particularly:

  • How quickly a session gets started
  • How quickly a tutor responds

We suggest that everyone take 3 minutes to review our Speed & Service video on how to improve session speed for students. Some tips include:

  • Instead of using the “How are you doing?” greeting, jump right into the problem. Example: “Hi Josh! I see you’ve already started #10. Can you explain why you subtracted 4 in the second step?”
  • Instead of sending multiple sentences in a single message, break that message into multiple shorter messages. This allows the student to process what you’re saying while you type.
  • Let the student know when you need a moment to review their problem or check longer chunks of work. This can be as simple as saying “Hi John! I just need 1 more minute to review your work before we get started” or “Checking your work now :)”.

As a general goal, aim to keep your average response time in each session below 20 seconds. This takes some practice, but we find that tutors are able to accomplish this over time.

 

Message delays

We’ve heard from folks that there is a bug with messages being sent on a delay. Henry has relayed the information to our engineers and they’re working hard to resolve the issue. Please continue to report instances through the “Report Issue” button on the Tutor Dashboard!

Pre-Session Questions, Tutor Spotlight, Session Disputes, and Farewell to Sharon

Pre-Session Questions

Kreg announced earlier this week that a change went out for some users, which cut out the pre-session questions.

Since students are no longer spending time answering these questions, it is more apparent to them when tutors are taking the time to diligently review the problem. To combat this, we encourage you to greet the student right after you claim the session and open up the problem. While you wait for their reply, scan over the problem and the student’s work if applicable. If they haven’t started yet, you can ask them if they have any questions on what the problem is asking them to do. If you feel like you need more time, you can flag that to the student: “I’m just going to need a couple more minutes to review your work” and feel free to ask them more about their work if it seems a bit unclear: “While I review your work, can you describe what you did?”. 

Tutor Spotlight

Congratulations to our tutor spotlight: Partha Sarathi Reddy Kamireddy! We were able to share this session with the whole team a couple weeks ago.

The student came in not knowing how to write interval notation when trying to exclude certain numbers. Partha picked up on this when he noticed the student’s confusion (E2) and spent some time explaining the concept. Sometimes a student’s confusion can be subtle, but it’s important to pick up on these cues to ensure they have a positive experience in sessions. Way to go, Partha!

Next week, we will pick our next tutor spotlight. Please fill out the Tutor Spotlight Nomination form so we can continue to celebrate the amazing interactions you have with students! Reminder that there is a $25 reward for being featured!

Session Disputes

As we’ve rolled out our new rubric, we’ve heard a lot of positive feedback from tutors. At the same time, we expect that with any rubric there will sometimes be disagreement around ratings. We now feel that our alignment is strong enough that we’d like to bring back the process of disputing sessions.

Session disputes are meant to provide tutors with a venue to seek out additional feedback or disagree with a score. They also help TQMs identify areas of misalignment with rubric grading

Moving forward, if you feel that your session was unfairly marked down, you may use the Session Dispute Form. Please review the instructions carefully before submitting a dispute, and reach out if you have any questions.

Farewell to Sharon

After 6 years of working with Yup in some capacity, next week is Sharon’s last week at Yup. 

It has been a pleasure to work with you all! I will have fond memories of our interactions and will miss you! I have been truly blessed to work with such a passionate group of educators and wish you the best.

Sharon – thanks so much for your contributions to Yup during your time here. We wish you the best, and we’re excited for the next step in your journey!

Feel free to reach out directly to Sharon to say farewell or keep in touch. In the meantime, if you have any questions about different workstreams or projects, feel free to DM Kreg in Slack.

TGP Level Cutoffs, Tutor Spotlight, and Yup Reminders

Tutor Growth Pathway – Level Cutoffs

We launched the new rubric on July 12 and made the intentional decision to wait several weeks before performance would impact bonus payments.  We knew that it would take some time for everyone to get used to it, and thanks to your feedback, we’ve been able to make some edits allowing it to be even stronger.  Thanks to all of your hard work, we are excited to share that the average score since we switched over to the new rubric is 9.25!  This is great to see and shows your dedication to empowering every student to learn. We’ve seen the evidence in sessions as well, with more targeted checks for understanding right after teaching a student something new and helping students feel more empowered at the end of the session. To ensure that we continue to reward excellent performance, we are changing our TGP cutoffs:

Level Average Rubric Score
1 N/A
2 8.5
3 9.0
4 9.5
Bonus Level 1 9.25 (9.5 for TQMs)
Bonus Level 2 9.5 (9.75 for TQMs)

Please remember that for this cycle (September 1 to October 31) we are freezing your level, so you still have time to bring up your score to match the level you want to be.

Tutor Spotlight

Next week, we will pick our next tutor spotlight. Please fill out the Tutor Spotlight Nomination form so we can continue to celebrate the amazing interactions you have with students! Reminder that there is a $25 reward for being featured!

Yup Reminders

  • Bug reporting: Please be sure to use the Report Bug button, even if reporting the issue after the fact. This tool captures console information and sends it directly to our engineers.
  • Check your URL: Please be sure to use tutor.yup.com to access the tutor dashboard as this contains all the latest bug fixes.
  • Back to School: A lot of students have been going back to school. Hope you’ve been enjoying the increase in session volume! (Note: this week’s data only includes M-F so far.)