Assessing the student is actually one of the hardest parts of the entire session, and can take a lot of practice. Assessment begins as soon as you meet the tutee. Use your observation skills to figure out what you can learn about the tutee in this first moment. Do they seem confident or nervous? Are they excited to be working with a tutor, or are they shy, or are they embarrassed? Are they an adult student who will require you to access your knowledge about adult learners, or are they potentially a running start student who might need you to utilize and bridge high school teaching strategies with their college course work?

While you do not want to make assumptions about your tutee, these first moments can give you clues about things to listen for as you begin to talk with them. This is when your listening skills really come in handy. Don't be too quick to jump into the assisting stage. A few extra minutes of just talking to your tutee can sometimes mean the difference between a successful tutoring session and a not-so-successful one.

This is what you are already great at—helping students with their math, science, writing, etc. Most of this manual focuses on tips and techniques for the assisting stage, so we won’t spend too much time on it here. The primary thing to keep in mind is that this stage is called “assist” rather than “teach.” This isn’t just for the alliteration (although that’s a plus!).

Your goal as a peer tutor is to assist students to become better students by helping them process and work through what they have already learned in classes. Your goal isn’t to re-lecture the material for the instructor, evaluate a students’ assignment, or present a lot of brand-new concepts. Instead, help students to strengthen concepts they’ve already learned, figure out how to connect their textbooks and lecture notes, and/or discover their own ideas on a topic.

This step is often the hardest one for tutors, not because it involves a lot of work, but because it can make us feel awkward. This stage asks you to step away from your tutee (mentally, or even physically!) and allow them room to work on their own. It might seem like a waste of time to some tutors, and even some tutees—after all, they made a tutoring appointment to get help from a tutor, not to work on their own. However, if we don’t allow the tutee a little bit of space to work on the concepts that we’re helping them with, then we have no idea if those ideas are actually being absorbed. Your tutee might nod enthusiastically and say “yeah” after each sentence you utter, and you may feel like that tutee knows exactly what to do to work through their assignment, but when the tutee gets home they realize that they only had a surface understanding, enough to “get it” when someone else explains, but not enough to actually apply the concept to their assignment.

Allowing autonomy gives the tutee a chance to assess their own level of learning during the tutorial instead of waiting until they get home. With a new tutee, you may want to do this in gradual steps: first giving the student autonomy on just one small piece of a larger process, and then slowing growing the amount of things they need to do on their own, or the amount of time you give them to figure it out before stepping in to help. When you feel like they are ready, you may even start the tutee on a problem or activity and step away from the table for 5 minutes to give the tutee a chance to work through things on their own. Ideally this move happens when you have roughly 15 minutes left in the session, but it’s more important to let it evolve organically than to be exact about the timing. Before you leave, make sure they know exactly what you expect them to accomplish while you are away, and reassure them that you will be back. This brings us to the fourth and final “A”......

In the final step, return to your tutee and see how well they did while working on their own. Make sure to praise their efforts, whether they were successful or not (for more info on how to do this in a productive way, check out the section on “How to Praise Process” later in this manual). Ask them to walk you through what they did step-by-step. This will help you figure out where they might go wrong when they leave the Learning Commons, and should help you decide if the best way to end your session is with reminders of what you’ve already covered, clarification of a concept that the tutee still struggles with, or further application and bridging forward to the next concept.