Finding a tutor for your child can seem difficult at first, but it doesn’t have to be. To start the search process, leverage your network. Reach out to any teachers in the area who offer tutoring services. Ask your friends if they can connect you to potential tutors. You can find great tutors this way. Another way is to sign up for local tutoring centers such as Mathnasium or Kumon. The downside is these services can be a bit pricey. If these options aren’t satisfactory, you can try online tutoring. Thankfully, in this day and age online tutoring is more popular than ever.
Many parents are skeptical of online tutoring at first, but it can produce equal to or better results than in person tutoring. The reason for this is parents have more options and can select a tutor that better matches with their child. Another benefit is you can find tutors offering a wide range of prices allowing parents to pay a price that is more in line with their budget. I have tutored many students both in person and online. I can confidently say that online tutoring is just as effective as in person tutoring. From a tutor’s perspective, the online medium can be better because it allows me to pull up info and share it in a more presentable fashion. Online tutoring has made tremendous strides in the last decade, and I would highly recommend considering it. To get started with online tutoring, MVP Learners is a great place to start with affordable $40 lessons. Other sites such as Wyzant and Varsity Tutors can be decent as well, but charge high prices and fees.
After deciding on in person vs online, the next step is to pick out a tutor that meets your child’s needs. As I alluded to in my other article, “How to Tell if Your Child Needs Tutoring” the main thing you should be focused on is finding a tutor with similar interests and personality to your child so they look forward to coming in and learning. Now, this is not to say to just pick anyone based on their personality. There needs to be a prerequisite level of competency and teaching ability present for a tutor to be effective. Tutors need to be able to look at problems and solve them almost instantly in 90% of cases. It’s hard to explain something to a student if you barely know what’s going on yourself. That’s why I would recommend MVP Learners. At MVP Learners, all of our tutors are tested for competency in the subjects that they teach. All tutors go through a mock tutoring session in their interview where they have to prove that they not only know what they are talking about, but understand how to communicate their ideas to a student effectively. After being hired, tutors at MVP Learners undergo 10 hours of training where they learn how to teach and use digital tutoring tools. This diligent hiring process allows parents to rest easy knowing all tutors on the platform are qualified. Our staff can then focus on matching students and parents based on personality and interests since we know all of our tutors are qualified. On platforms like Wyzant, anyone can just sign up and it’s up to the parents to discern who is a good tutor and who isn’t.
Hopefully you now know what to search for when trying to find a tutor. Both online and in person tutoring can be effective methods of learning for your child. It really just comes down to whichever method you prefer. I hope that you can find a great tutor now that you know what to look for and where to look.