New Humanity Availability Feature, Outstanding Student Feedback Award, and Reminders

Hi, everyone,

We hope that you have had a great week! Our session volume remains predictably low, but student feedback has been strong: ratings this week are 96% positive – several points higher than usual. Amazing work everyone! Please take time to read through the remainder of this post which includes an introduction to a new humanity feature, a celebration of excellent work, and reminders.

Humanity Availability Feature

This week, we will be introducing some changes to our scheduling processes. In the past, we’ve used a combination of google forms and individual tutor outreach to determine everyone’s scheduled hours. Moving forward, we are going to replace this process by using the Availability feature on Humanity.

A little more context for this change: we’ve heard a couple of big pain points from tutors with our current system:

  • Tutors must schedule in 3-hour minimum chunks when they may only have one or two hours of availability within a time window. For example, you may want to work 2-4 pm on Tuesday, but you’re only allowed to indicate 12-3 pm OR 3-6 pm on our google form.
  • Schedule changes are granted upon request, requiring tutors to proactively reach out to us and negotiate for hours. This hasn’t been very efficient or equitable.

Using the Humanity availability feature will give you greater control over the time that you are available to tutor with us each week. It will also allow all tutors the same opportunity to adjust their preferred hours in real-time.

A few things to note about the flexibility of the system:

  • You will be able to set recurring availability. So if you will have about the same availability each week, you do not have to change anything after your initial setup. But you can if you would like to.
  • You will continue to be able to pick up open shifts or trades even if they are within the timeframe that you had set as unavailable. 

While there may be slightly more variability in your scheduled hours each week, you will have control over when you are able to work for Yup. The more availability, particularly during peak hours (typically between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. PDT during the school year), the greater potential of reaching your TGP maximum weekly hours.

Please follow the steps outlined below to set your availability for the week of Monday, June 27 – Sunday, July 3. You must set your availability by Wednesday, June 22rd at 8:00 a.m. PDT. If you do not indicate your availability by this time, you will be scheduled for any time frame.

Moving forward the deadline for updating your availability for the following week will be Thursdays at 12:00 p.m. PDT. If you set recurring availability, you can reduce or eliminate the need to make changes each week. 

For all of the processes listed below, there is a video showing the step-by-step process at the bottom of the list.

Set availability:

The process below shows you how to block off time that you are unavailable for shifts on Humanity.

  1. Log in to your Humanity account.
  2. Click Set Availability on the left side of your dashboard
  3. Hover over a date and time on the calendar till you see a plus sign appear.
  4. Click the plus for an hour that you would like to indicate that you are unavailable.
  5. Adjust the time frame 
  6. Click Save.

Set recurring availability:

If you know that you will be unavailable at the same time every week or multiple days every week, you can indicate the time slot as unavailable for recurring days or weeks.

  1. Repeat steps 1-5 from Set Availability above
  2. Click the drop-down menu “Does not Repeat”
  3. Select the frequency that you would like the time slot to be marked unavailable. (Repeats Weekly, Repeats bi-weekly, Repeats Monthly).
  4. Select the days of the week that you would like the time slot to be marked unavailable.
  5. Click Save

Editing availability:

Once you have blocked off a time slot and it displays as unavailable, the only way to edit or adjust the time slot is to delete it and set a new time. To delete:

  1. Click the time slot that is displayed in light red on your availability calendar.
  2. Click the trash can icon.
  3. If this is from a time slot that you had set up as recurring you will be asked if you want to delete this one occurrence or all future occurrences.

 

Outstanding Student Feedback Award

Congratulations to Pralhad Mohan Shinde for earning the Outstanding Student Feedback Award! This award is given to tutors who receive consistent, outstanding written feedback from students over several weeks along with demonstrating excellent overall performance. Students respond positively to Pralhad’s fun and encouraging tone. His kind tone also creates an environment where students feel willing to take intellectual risks.

Some of Pralhad’s exceptional student feedback comments include:

  • “Thanks for helping me out today!! I really needed help with factoring and you helped!”
  • “Thanks for helping me again today!!”
  • “Very patient and will stay till the end until you understand”
  • “Thanks for making everything simple!! I didn’t understand it but now I do!”
  • “Mr. Shinde made it easy for my math problem :D”
  • “Really helpful I understood the lesson really quickly with his help”

Way to go, Pralhad!

Reminders

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.)

Rubric Changes and Tutor Spotlight

Rubric Changes

One of our priorities in creating the new rubric was ensuring that students ended the session feeling positive and motivated.  This includes feeling heard throughout the session as they express their preferences.  And after two weeks, the preliminary results are promising! We have seen a 4-5% increase in student ratings since the day we introduced the rubric. Thank you for applying any feedback you’ve received!

As we dug deeper into the data, we still saw transcripts that looked like the following:

In this snippet, the student stated that he was in a rush, but in an effort to satisfy rubric criteria for “Check” and “Reflect”, the tutor was reluctant to move onto the next problem. This put both the student and the tutor in a situation where an otherwise great session might end awkwardly (at best) and negatively (at worst). 

The second empathy strand, E2, on the new rubric seeks to address this challenge. The more that the tutor responds to the student’s cues and preferences, the more likely they are to return to Yup and the more likely they are to benefit from the support that you do such great work to provide.  

Pillar Strand Indicators Common Mistakes
Empathy E2 – Does the student feel heard? Respond to questions, emotional cues, and signs of confusion Ignore questions, emotional cues, signs of confusion, or student priorities

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 support you all are providing to Yup students. Reminder that there is a $25 reward for being featured!

Outstanding Student Feedback Award

Outstanding Student Feedback Award

Congratulations to Javier Cobos for earning the Outstanding Student Feedback Award! This award is given to tutors who receive consistent, outstanding written feedback from students over several weeks along with demonstrating excellent overall performance.

Some of Javier’s exceptional student feedback comments include:

  • “For my first time using yup i had a great time Mr.cobos was a very well tutor he helped a great amount”
  • “Thank you for you help you are fun and make me want to do more math”
  • “You are so patient going over every detail on these problems with me thank you”
  • “VERYY Patient and Kind. Covered ALL of my questions that I had. Thank you so much! 5/5 stars”
  • “Thank you so much for clarifying. After 3 yup consultations, I finally understood it.”

Way to go Javier!