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NTA, a LifeBound partner, sponsers TutorPalooza

Busy day of training ends in peer tutor certification for 500 students at TutorPalooza

by Jessica Bobula
Oct 16, 2007

TutorPalooza tü-tər-pə-lüz-zə (n.) 1. an all-day certification extravaganza held at Wheeling High School for about 500 student instructors.

Sponsored by the National Tutoring Association, TutorPalooza kicked off the association’s Peer Tutoring Initiative with the one-day training and certification event. The free event concluded National Tutoring Week, and each participant received a Level 1 Basic certification.

Most of the trainees attend suburban Chicago high schools, but some traveled from as far as Detroit to participate on Saturday. Even a few college students from the University of St. Francis in Joliet joined the group.

Taking advantage of the high school’s broadcast studio, small groups of tutors and their trainers gathered in classrooms throughout the school to view a live feed of the day’s training lessons.

Linda Stevens Hjorth, a professor at DeVry University in Addison and member of the association, led a few sessions from the broadcast studio. Hjorth ran a tutoring ethics exercise, presenting the case of a hypothetical student who tells his tutor that his teacher had said he could ask his tutor for answers to an assignment. The tutors-in-training wrote their responses, which were conveyed to Hjorth in the studio. Many trainees wrote that doing work for students is unethical.

“Many of your responses were appropriate,” Hjorth said, “because tutors can never give answers.”

Hjorth advised the students that the best tutors always consider ethics, integrity, wisdom and respect.

“Think about ethics on a daily basis,” Hjorth said.

At the end of the day, the tutors gathered in the auditorium to hear Sandi Ayaz, executive director of the National Tutoring Associaton. Ayaz said they should be proud of their tutoring efforts.

“You’ll never be anything more than you are right now,” Ayaz said, “because what you are (going to be), you already are. You just don’t know it yet.

“And that’s why it is so extraordinary what you get to do,” she said. “Because what the students you help are (going to be), they already are. They just don’t know it yet.”

An important aspect of the relationship between student and tutor is the benefits both parties reap, Ayaz said. Studies show that tutors’ grades and test scores increase, and both students and tutors are gratified when their work ends in success, she said.

Though they were newly certified, some tutors had already experienced those benefits.

“Thank you for allowing me to have the opportunity to work with students,” said Linette Rayahin, a student at Maine West High School in Des Plaines and a recipient of one of four scholarships given at the event, “I couldn’t write such a good essay as this if it weren’t for my experience tutoring.”

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