How does working with
The Missing Piece Tutoring work?
When Covid-19 happened in 2020 the world changed. Schools, teachers and students were forced to figure out how to work together online. It was challenging time, but a time of progression and innovation in the online world. E-learning, or learning online, was not a new concept, but not widespread. People still preferred face to face, and didn’t fully understand that learning really could happen online, and that it could be effective. I won’t say that in the beginning it was always effective, there was a learning curve in the education realm, but for tutors, it opened up a new world.
The best part, there were companies who saw the chance to really expand their services and build online platforms. They created “whiteboards” and tutoring platforms. They created ways for people to meet virtually, and even record what they were doing during those meetings. Fast forward 4 years later to 2024 when I am writing this, and the technology has only improved and expanded. Now there are platforms designed for tutoring and education specifically, though these are not only the best, and at The Missing Piece Tutoring, we only want the best for our clients, while still making sure we provide affordable tutoring options for you. So, I have spent time with one of my amazing, willing clients trying out different platforms to find the one with the best options (and surprisingly, it was not Zoom). We wanted to make sure we could record sessions. Not every tutoring session needs to be recorded, but for some of our clients, it is important they have those to go back to for their learning. We wanted to make sure they had the functionality of being able to see websites, switching between browsers is not easy for some of our younger or our less technical clients. We wanted to make sure that it had options, like being able to roll dice, type and draw, have more than just 1 student in for our groups, and I could go on, all while being affordable so not to drive up tutoring costs. At this time, we are using Liveboard, and looking into their tutoring group platform they are creating but have not fully launched. It has a lot of features that will make it amazing, but of course, we have to pay attention to the budget when they come out with pricing.
The bottom line is, we work on a platform that makes it fully functional for the the greatest techie to the technologically challenged to be able to join us online and fully participate in our sessions.
What do sessions look like? That depends one what you sign up for. If you are one on one, your session will be specifically designed for what you need. We will continuously meet with you (or your parent) to look at your progress and talk next steps. If you would like, we can give you things to do when you are not meeting with us to continue to practice until we meet again. If you are in a group, the group will have a focus but it will continually adapt to the students in the group and their needs. If a member of the group stands out as having different needs, we won’t keep them in the group. We will discuss different options for them because our goal is to always making sure you are getting the most out of every minute you spend with us in tutoring.
The most important part of tutoring for us is the relationship we build with you. We want to it to be an open communication. We will communicate with you what we are seeing, what you are doing well, and what we think are next steps. We ask that you communicate with us what we are doing well, what you think are next steps, and if you don’t agree with our next steps, what you would like them to be. I personally like to start of my tutoring sessions with a personal chat about how things are going because I know as a teacher, a relationship is important to learning. Without a relationship and trust, a “student” is not as willing to learn. So, as a parent, know when you hear me asking your child about their week, that is intentional and a very important part of the session. The more your child trusts me, they will learn more and be more willing to learn. You may even hear me showing them my dog or sharing a story, this is crucial relationship building! It doesn’t last long, and the majority of our time is focused on learning!
We would love to talk more with you about our programs and tutoring with us. As always, if we don’t have a tutoring program that works with your needs, we have a network of teachers who are also teachers that we can refer you to, so please, reach out even if you don’t see what you think you need. We will do our best to help you find the right tutor!