Feedback – What It Is and How to Give It
While a single tutoring session can itself be impactful in small doses, true student growth happens over time. Tutoring is most effective as a long-term practice. It prioritizes a student’s individual needs in order to foster confidence and consistency. Progress tracking is one of the biggest benefits of Gooroo. After every session with Gooroo, families will be sent clear and comprehensive feedback through our easy-to-use interface. Read on to learn more about how our feedback process works.
The feedback process
After a tutoring session, your Gooroo will upload feedback via our app or website. We ask our Gooroos to submit feedback as soon as possible following the session. This ensures that you are receiving session feedback within a timely manner.
When a Gooroo enters feedback, they are asked a standard set of questions to track all elements of student progress. This helps to inform future sessions. It also provides families with strategies and insight into a student’s learning style that can be expanded upon at home. First, your Gooroo will write a summary of the session—including broad topics that were covered as well as specific pages or units. The purpose of the summary section is to state exactly how the lesson time was spent.
A student’s learning style
Next your Gooroo will assess the student’s learning style. Learning styles are particular for each individual. But of course, as students evolve oftentimes so do their preferred approaches. Keeping an eye on the kinds of teaching that works for a student (and more importantly, the kinds that don’t work) are crucial. There are five core learning styles: Theory, Storytelling, Analogy, Discovery, and Instruction. For more information, visit our learning styles page.
After assessing a student’s learning style, your Gooroo tutors then evaluate the student’s soft skills. These skills are broken down into four categories: Tenacity/Grit, Curiosity/Creativity, Communication, and Organization/Self-management. Feedback for each of these categories is recorded on a sliding scale that indicates whether the student is developing, demonstrating, or excelling in a given skill area. We don’t expect a student to go from developing to excelling overnight. Rather, nurturing these soft skills is a long-term process. As the saying goes, slow and steady wins the race! In the same way that learning styles are a personal thing, so is a student’s rate of growth. A student excelling in one soft skill may take months or years to catch up in another. These ups and downs show that a student is adapting to new challenges, and as a result, progressing.
For the final component of the feedback, the Gooroo will detail accomplishments and/or struggles that the student experienced in the course of the session. The Gooroo will describe any notable moments in detail, and also provide strategies for improving learning difficulties or maintaining positive progress.
Why is feedback important?
We believe progress tracking is one of the biggest benefits of Gooroo as it enables families to monitor and ensure consistent student growth. Having a study session for a big exam and getting an A+ as a result is a wonderful thing—but what about all the exams that will follow? It’s about more than simply doing well on one thing, or maintain a steady flow of good grades; our Gooroos’ chief aim is to help students develop the habits, confidence, and focusto excel no matter what they do.
While all parents know their child better than anyone, this isn’t always the case when it comes to knowing how a child best learns. It’s incredibly common to for parents to misunderstand their child’s needs—always out of love, of course. We strive to understand each and every student. Progress tracking enables us to share this understanding with families. This way, students and their families can be actively working on improvement both during and outside of tutoring.
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