Report Cards + SotW & Bonuses

Report Cards are up and running!

Now that we have completed several weeks under Rubric 3.0’s teaching standards, this session data is now available to you via your new Tutor Workbook’s Report Card page.

Use the “Week of:” drop down menu at the top right of the page to select a Report Card week to view.

Seeing a blank Report Card when you open your workbook? Following the above instructions for selecting a week from the drop-down menu will encourage your session data to load. Check out our Tutor Workbook Guide or email us at tutor.support@yup.com for more information.


SESSION OF THE WEEK

Congratulations to Session of the Week winner, Kevin Osbourne! Nice work using guiding questions to encourage the student to play an active role in the session, Kevin!

Nominate one of your own exceptional sessions via the submission form and you could win a $25 bonus!

PERFORMANCE BONUS RECIPIENTS

Congratulations to the following tutors who achieved a Top Ten tutor ranking for two or more consecutive weeks, earning them a $25 performance bonuses. Great work!

– Partha Sarathi Reddy Kamireddy
– Helen Herring
– Vaughan Leslie
– Sekhar Reddy K
– Rowena-Renee Xymines

Happy tutoring!

— Team Yup

The Art of Pushing Information, Part 1

Let’s say you’re in a session with a student who’s visibly stuck and frustrated by a lack of progress. You’ve just asked some guiding questions, but with no success.

What’s a tutor to do now??

We know how tricky this scenario can be, given our dedication to student involvement.

While it’s definitely bad for a student to get so much help that they fail to learn, it’s just as bad and often worse for the learning process when they get so little help that they give up completely.

Instead of asking more guiding questions that the student may just guess on or not answer, here’s an initial list of tips for inspiration. Future posts in this series will expand on tactics like these.

  1. Walk the student through increasingly simple, targeted examples.
  2. Provide encouraging, motivating, and supportive language.
  3. Give increasingly specific hints about what the next step requires the student to use, find, or do.
  4. Assure the student that they’ll get to the answer AND feel comfortable with this material in the future if they bear with you for a while longer.
  5. Further break down explanations you’ve given earlier in the session, focusing on what the student is having the most trouble with.
  6. Do a small part of the work for the student, then have the student take over.
  7. Discover more of what the student DOES understand and build on top of it.

What other tactics have helped you in these situations? Please discuss and tell us what you think in the comments section below!

-Team Yup

Discussion:

Canned Responses + SotW & Bonuses

Important Update About Canned Responses & Tags

As you know, with the release of Rubric 3.0 our tagging system has slightly changed. Not only have we added new tags like “Exceptional” and “Poor communication”, but we have also automated a few of our tags so they automatically are applied to certain sessions.

For example, using the canned response (known as “Auto Replies” on your tutor dashboard) for inappropriate behavior will automatically trigger our system to tag the session as ‘Inappropriate Behavior’ and block the student. Similarly, using the cheating canned response will automatically apply the “Cheating” tag to the session.

For this reason, it is extremely important that you are using canned responses when applicable so the appropriate tags are be applied. This means:

– Using the “Inappropriate Behavior” canned response when the student sends foul, threatening or sexual messages or images

– Using the “Cheating” canned response when a student admits to taking a non-practice test, exam or quiz.

SESSION OF THE WEEK

Congratulations to Session of the Week winner, Sejal Kothari! Nice work using a whiteboard example to break down the concept for the student, Sejal!

Nominate one of your own exceptional sessions via the submission form and you could win a $25 bonus!

PERFORMANCE BONUS RECIPIENTS

Congratulations to the following tutors who achieved a Top Ten tutor ranking for two or more consecutive weeks, earning them a $25 performance bonuses. Great work!

–   Partha Sarathi Reddy Kamireddy
–   Helen Herring
–   Namburi M Krishna Varma
–   Vaughan Leslie 

Happy tutoring!

— Team Yup

Updates to Speed Policies and Response Speed Reminder

Hello Tutors,

Thanks for your insightful feedback on our Response Speed Reminder!

The changes below are in response to your feedback, the “new normal” we’ve reached with messaging speed, and the emphasis we want to put on the speed policies rather than the Response Speed Reminder.

  • Starting the week of August 21st, your median tutor-to-student response time needs to be below 8 seconds, rather than 10 seconds, to earn a $25 bonus for the week. Your median tutor-to-anyone response time must be below 25 seconds, rather than 30, to avoid 2 infractions for the week.
  • Effective immediately, the Response Speed Reminder will appear two minutes, rather than 45 seconds, after your latest message.

You will not need to worry about these targets moving again for the foreseeable future. With these changes in place, we’ll be focusing much less on messaging speed and much more on instruction pace, which we’ve found to be a more pressing issue for most students. You can expect your Tutor Whiteboard, Canned Responses, and Review State to be improved and streamlined in the coming weeks. A couple last points:

  • Some key cases prevent us from being able to tie the Response Speed Reminder to the student’s messages rather than yours. For example, the student may repeatedly send messages like “Hello? Are you there?” which would prevent the tutor from receiving the warning.
  • For a sense of what your fellow tutors are thinking: roughly 80% of you responded that tutors should be sending a message every 15 to 45 seconds on average, which is in line with our general expectations of Tutor-To-Tutor messaging speed.

Keep up the great work,

Team Yup

 

Test Policy Update

We all know how important it is to avoid helping students with graded exams – however going forward we ask that you refrain from asking students if they’re taking a test unless you have reason to believe they are.

This means that unless the words “quiz”, “test”, or “exam” are visible on an uploaded image, it is no longer necessary to ask the student if they are taking a test.

Have a great weekend!

— Team Yup