Students Tutoring Students

This is my Students Tutoring Students contract. Before my middle school students work with my younger students I review this contract with them. By pre-planning this contact, I am able to have a set of guidelines that are clear for my older students while working with my younger ones and hold them accountable for their tutoring commitment. This contract also requires students to design their own project to implement with the younger students, which helps fulfill the "learning" requirement of Service Learning Hours.

Choosing the students who will participate in the program takes careful planning and coordination. I need to ensure that my middle school students are not missing valuable instruction time when working with my younger students, but the time that they do spend with them will be meaningful and long enough to be effective. Currently, I am able to take my middle school students out of their resource periods that overlap with my younger students' instructional blocks. Here is a copy of my schedule, where you can see the times identified where my tutors assist my students (in black).

My peer tutors are able to assist with a variety of activities for my younger students, including word sorts, filling out reflection sheets, reading books, and acting as a buddy during turn and talks during small group instruction. Here you can see my middle school students working with my younger ESOL students on some of these activities. You can also observe how my older students are building relationships with students across lines of difference by working with students who are younger, speak different languages, and come from different backgrounds than themselves. Not only does this give my younger students more one-on-one attention, but it teaches my older students responsibility and gives them exposure to the career of an educator.

The video attached is of an 8th-grade student working with a PreK student on word sorts. You can observe here how the student is independently leading the activity for the PreK student.

Here is my quarterly running record of hours that my students have participated in for Students Tutoring Students. As you can see, both students who primarily tutor have completed over 15 hours over Quarter 3, helping out their younger peers. Through spending this much time together, I hope that my students developed significant, lasting relationships, as well as worked to set up their peers for success! By enabling my middle schoolers to complete their service learning hours during the school day, I am opening doors to volunteer opportunities that they may not otherwise have.

Here is a video of my students and I executing the "explosion" portion of the volcano lesson.