Yup Tutor Community

Hello,

We hope you have enjoyed your week! In reviewing comments for the Outstanding Student Feedback Award, it was such a pleasure to see all of the amazing feedback you have received from students and the incredible impact our tutors have on the young learners of Yup! This post contains this month’s Outstanding Student Feedback Award, some helpful guidelines for the Post-Session Comments, and the live whiteboard. Please review carefully and thank you for all that you do to spread the love of mathematics!

Outstanding Student Feedback Award

Congratulations to Bharathi Vavilakolanu 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 Bharathi’s exceptional student feedback comments include:

• “She was kind and told me that I could do it”
• “Thanks for your help! Your instructions and drawings were really clear. Very helpful and encouraging.”
• “Thanks for being awesome and answering my questions”
• “She was very patient since it took my a little bit to figure out the equations and problems.”
• “Thank you for your understandable explanations and kindness :)”
• “Thank you Ms. Vavilakolanu for being so kind, helpful, and detail oriented”
• “She was so nice and helped me get through one of the most confusing questions I’ve ever done. If this was a rating, I would give 5 Stars!”

Way to go, Bharathi!

Post-Session Comment Guideline

Post-session comments are an important part of our work with students. The post-session comment is reviewed by the student’s teacher or parent to understand the big picture of what occurred in the session. The engagement score should reflect how the student participated in the session. We have observed that some students have been assigned an engagement score of “Not Engaged” when they have to leave the session early or before the problem has been completed. A student who actively participates in a session, no matter the length of the session, should be assigned an engagement score other than “Not Engaged”. Please refer to the Post-Session Comments training deck for more information.

Live Whiteboard Guideline

Reviewing sessions where tutors have used the live whiteboard, it is clear the positive impact it has had on session quality and efficiency. When using the live whiteboard, please click “send” intermittently (i.e. when a problem or explanation is complete). This is important because it:

1. preserves the work so a student can come back and review.
2. ensures that the entirety of the session is able to be reviewed by TQMs, teachers, and parents which is a quality control and safety measure.

Additional updates to the whiteboard will continue to be rolled out. The next update to come will be an undo button for students so they can more easily correct their own work. A timeline and more information on this feature will be coming soon!

Nominate Yourself for the Tutor Spotlight!

We want to see your highlights! Please nominate yourself so we have the opportunity to view and celebrate your achievements and incredible interactions with students!

Please fill out the Tutor Spotlight Nomination form so we can continue to celebrate the amazing interactions you have with students! A reminder that there is a $25 reward for being featured! 

We are looking for sessions where:

• The student has a positive experience which is shown by the student:
  • being very willing to do the work.
  • leaving a positive rating.
  • being positive throughout the session.
  • finding solutions to problems that were challenging them.
• You earned a high rubric score.

Reminders:

Hi, all!

We hope you had a wonderful week! We are very excited about the launch of the new Live Whiteboard feature! We have heard from many of you that it has improved session efficiency and overall quality. Another update is coming soon that will allow students to undo/erase their own work followed by additional student tools (different pen colors, straight lines, etc). We will keep you posted on the timeline of those further improvements. Please take a few moments to provide your feedback on the Live Whiteboard. Thank you for your continued dedication to ensuring that every student is empowered to learn!

Tutor Spotlight

Congratulations to our tutor spotlight: Shernice Kramer! Shernice submitted an outstanding session she had with a student where they worked together to dilate a triangle. Shernice commented that in this session “the student had some difficulty with finding the image of the translated figure. Despite making a few errors, she preserved on and remained positive, managing to solve her problem. She was also willing to do some additional work to practice her understanding on the topic more.” Shernice expertly navigated the student through productive struggle with a positive tone and genuine encouragement. The student reflected on her time with Shernice by sharing “she was a very nice tutor and helped me do a practice problem just to make sure I really understood the concept I was struggling with!”. Shernice’s ability to build rapport with the student provided a safe space to struggle, persevere, and learn. Well done, Shernice and thank you for sharing!

Nominate Yourself for the Tutor Spotlight!

We want to see your highlights! Please nominate yourself so we have the opportunity to view and celebrate your achievements and incredible interactions with students!

Please fill out the Tutor Spotlight Nomination form so we can continue to celebrate the amazing interactions you have with students! A reminder that there is a $25 reward for being featured! 

We are looking for sessions where:

• The student has a positive experience which is shown by the student:
  • being very willing to do the work.
  • leaving a positive rating.
  • being positive throughout the session.
  • finding solutions to problems that were challenging them.
• You earned a high rubric score.

Rotate Image Tool

Check out the Google chrome extension: Image Rotate Context. This allows you to right-click and then rotate an image right or left.

This can be helpful when reviewing submitted images from students. When you install the extension, you have to restart your computer for the tool to start working correctly. Hope this helps improve your tutoring experience!

 

Reminders:

Hi, everyone,

We hope you have had a nice week! Thank you for your communication and patience as we rolled out the new  Tutor Ranking System.  In this post, we are introducing a new feature that will help increase collaboration with students as well as provide some tutor metric guidelines. We appreciate your dedication to ensuring every student is empowered to learn and all the amazing work that you do every day with our young learners.

Introducing the LIVE Whiteboard!

We are excited to announce a new feature! Our engineers have been hard at work developing a live, interactive whiteboard. This feature will allow students to see you write on the whiteboard in real-time. Students will be able to write back directly on the same whiteboard. The intention is to increase collaboration, decrease perceived student wait time, and help resolve instances where students are unable to send work through images. This feature will continue to develop and will currently only be available for students using the Web App. Please review the information below about the new feature. We will let you know in #announcements in slack exactly when this new feature will be deployed but it will be early next week.

What does the live whiteboard look like for the student and the tutor?

Please watch the short clip below. The student window is on the left and the tutor window is on the right.

 

How do I know if the whiteboard I am working on is live?

The live whiteboard will have a red box outlining the entire space. You can also tell by looking at the images area, the live whiteboard will be at the top of the middle panel and will have Live View beneath the card. 

You can switch which whiteboard is live by dragging and dropping the whiteboards:

 

You can switch which whiteboard is live by clicking the Make Live button on the tools panel:

How do I make sure the session transcript is complete?

It is imperative that you click send whenever you are done working on a live whiteboard. This is important because it:

1. preserves the work so a student can come back and review. 
2. ensures that the entirety of the session is able to be reviewed by TQMs, teachers, and parents which is a quality control and safety measure.

Also, the screenshot sent will only include the portion of the whiteboard currently within view in your browser. As result, if the whiteboard has markings across the entire vertical length, you may need to send multiple screenshots (i.e. send the first, scroll down, send the second). If this proves challenging, we will change it in future updates.

Is there a size limit for the whiteboard?

The size of the whiteboard will adjust based on the size of your screen or your browser window. You can scroll vertically in order to continue working a single problem on one whiteboard. Remember to click SEND when the work is complete.

 

How will you know if a student is using iOS/Android or the WebApp?

If a student is using a iOS/Android device, a banner will appear across the tutor’s screen. This will remind you that you have to send all whiteboard images and the student is unable to access the live whiteboard.

Tutor Metric Guidelines

At Yup our mission is to empower every student to learn. The student experience is at the center of this important work. Student feedback helps to inform best teaching practices. This is true in the classroom or tutoring in person or online. For this reason, we decided to incorporate two forms of student feedback into the Yup tutoring professionalism metrics: Student Rating and Favorite Tutor Rating. Both of these are indicators of how the student feels about their learning experience.

In many interviews that we have held with students over the years, they have expressed the struggles that they have felt ending sessions. We have incorporated this feedback into our teaching framework within the Empathy pillar. Tutors are expected to allow students to end the session on their own terms. There is an inherent power dynamic within a tutoring session that is the responsibility of the tutor to be cognizant of. Tutors have the ability to influence the way that a student feels about math and themselves as learners. With this in mind, the expectation is that tutors do not ask students to give a thumbs-up rating or to favorite them at the end of the session.

Students are prompted to rate each session upon completion. They can choose to select tutors as their favorite in three places: 1. immediately after they finish a session, 2. when they are reviewing their transcripts, or 3. during the session itself:

 

 

Our goal is for students to feel empowered and this includes how and what feedback they provide. TQMs will help monitor this guideline in their review of sessions to ensure student agency and comfort. Thank you for all that you do to keep the student experience at the center of your work!

Hello everyone!

Thank you for carefully reviewing Friday’s newsfeed post introducing the use of the Tutor Ranking System to calculate Tutor Growth Pathway (TGP) levels. For those of you who have reached out with observations and questions, your feedback is always welcome and appreciated.

With the adjustments to the TGP, the tutor dashboard will be displaying simplified metrics. These changes will be deployed tomorrow as the workbooks flip to the next cycle. The metric categories that will be available in your dashboard will be:

1. Performance
2. Professionalism
3. Payment

 

Performance

A few important notes regarding these metrics and how they display are below:

• Level – The level displayed is your TGP cycle for the current cycle (calculated using metrics from the prior cycle). The level will update at the start of a new TGP cycle. 
• Each of the Metrics that Matter displays your metric for the cycle as well as an average for the other tutors at your TGP level. The average is to provide you with a general sense of how you are doing in comparison to the rest of your cohort. If you are well above the averages in all categories, you may move up a level in the next cycle. If you are well below the averages, you may move down. This is intended to provide a benchmark for interpreting your performance.

Professionalism

These metrics have not changed. The expectation is that the attendance and claim percentages exceed 85% and the sessions with tags are below 10%. If this expectation is not met, there is a potential that working contracts will be reconsidered.

Payment

Payment displays dual qualification and level bonuses. The monthly bonus has now been incorporated into the level bonus and will no longer be displayed in the workbook.

Favorite Student

To see which students have favorited you, a heart will appear next to their name.

As we make this transition, we thank you for your continued dedication to our young learners. Please let us know if you have any questions!

Hello everyone,

We hope you have had a tremendous week! As always, it was a pleasure to review sessions where you coached students through challenging problems. Our sessions this week were steeped in ah-ha moments reached through productive struggle. Thank you for all that you do to empower students to learn!

Introducing the New Tutor Ranking System

We have an amazing tutor base! Our current Tutor Growth Pathway system is designed to identify and reward our best tutors. However, our current system has two main issues:

1. It heavily relies on rubric scores, which can be subjective.
2. It does not take into account the volume of sessions a tutor receives each cycle.

We’ve designed a new tutor-ranking system to provide a more objective framework that incorporates the metrics that tutors are already familiar with. This ranking system will:

• provide greater transparency in leveling by reducing the subjective analysis required
• allow promising new tutors to move through the Tutor Growth Pathway more quickly
• promote the tutors who are having the greatest positive impact on the student experience

Please take some time to review the Tutor Ranking System Training to learn more about the changes and the new system’s impact on TGP levels.

As mentioned in the training, we will rework the weekly schedule based on tutor preference and TGP levels. The goal will be to schedule tutors for the maximum number of hours dictated by their TGP level and their preference.  Please complete the Schedule Preference Form by Monday, April 4 at 12:00 p.m. PDT. On this form, you will submit your overall preference and availability. If the preferences you provide largely match your existing schedule, we will do what we can to keep your hours as similar as possible.

Here is a timeline of what to expect:

As you review this new information, you may have questions about how this change will impact you individually. We will be happy to answer your questions and concerns, so please feel free to reach out either via slack (@haddie) or email (tutor.support@yup.com). Thank you for all that you do to support our young learners!