Peer tutor

A peer tutor is anyone who is of a similar status as the person being tutored. In an undergraduate institution this would usually be other undergraduates, as distinct from the graduate students who may be teaching the writing classes; in a K-12 school this is usually a student from the same grade or higher. There are some basic rules to establishing your peer tutoring program, the key to success is a clear objective. Thorough planning and evidence gathering activities will contribute to substantiation of the decisions you will make.
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There are many benefits for both the peer tutor and tutee in this relationship; one aspect of this is that the tutor can establish a rapport with the tutee in a way that a teacher cannot. A peer tutor may have taken the same class recently, or have taken similar classes.
Tutors themselves benefit from working with students. The skills a tutor develops can be applied to other aspects in life including graduate school or a future job. The main skill being that ability to work with people. Peer tutors often succeed better in their respective courses due to the opportunity to help others. They are allowed to spend lots of time working through adversity which ultimately benefits them in the classroom. In the course of tutoring, there could be more benefits than challenges for the tutors themselves. Careers are often influenced from a person's experience in peer tutoring. Peer tutoring help people develop the skill to be a leader. These skills can serve an important role for success in one's career.
Because the peer tutor is seen by the tutee as being more at their own level, advice given by the tutor may be accepted more readily than advice from a teacher. Another key reason for this is that a peer tutor does not give any grade on the paper, whereas a teacher serving in a tutor role may still be perceived as someone who grades papers. Students in peer tutoring programs benefit from creating better attitudes and self concept regardless of academic performance.
Peer tutors skills are based off of creating a healthy environment for the tutee. They often give positive feedback, keep the person being tutored on task, give praise, and give reassurance. The tutor also tends to switch up teaching strategies.
In higher education tutorial settings, the benefits of peer tutoring programs also extend to class tutors. Using grounded theory techniques, it was found that the following five themes underlie their experiences: role exploration, sharing responsibility, regulation of the peer tutored groups, harnessing the peer tutors’ role, and community (see article for further detail).
ESL training can be separated from regular tutor training as a subject that contains special difficulties that must be dealt with on their own. Tutoring in an Online Writing Lab can also be separated from conventional training.
Stated by Goodlad and Sinclair, "Peer tutoring is the system of instruction in which learners help each other and learn by teaching. Tutoring schemes have been used in a variety of context, with students teaching students, students teaching school pupils, non-professional adults teaching adults and children, and pupils teaching pupils."
Keith James Topping's work on peer tutoring identified a typology of peer tutoring that includes ten dimensions: 1) curriculum content, 2) constant constellation, 3) year of study, 4) ability, 5) role continuity, 6)place, 7)time, 8) tutee characteristics, 9) tutor characteristics and 10)objectives.

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