How We're Different

If you've read our seven common sense learning principles, you know there is nothing mysterious about what makes our classes great and our students succeed. The real question is, why are we the only ones to apply these principles in our teaching methods?

The answer has to do with class sizes and the experience levels of instructors. We break down the approaches to teaching and test prep below to demonstrate why these institutions are organically incapable of producing whole learners, despite their best intentions.

School

K-12 schools, whether public or private, serve a dual role: 1) to impart a measurable level of education onto their students, and 2) to house our youth during the workday. Like a mini-society, schools have a highly structured division of labor by role, grade, and subject area. As such, no one is directly responsible for any given student and, certainly, very little personalized instruction is possible.

This brings us to the inherent nature of schools: students are herded to too many activities; periods are unnaturally long; rejuvenating breaks, artistic diversions, and even P.E. and recess are short or non-existent; lecturing is the only way to dump the required lessons on students while monitoring behavior; and measuring student progress has replaced actual learning.

We can't fault schools for their lowest common denominator approach, but we can't expect them to create whole learners either, confident in their own learning habits and prepared to problem solve new challenges.

Test Prep

Companies that specialize in standardized test preparation are often big national chains that suffer from the same problem as schools: a one-size-fits-all curriculum. Test prep tutors, furthermore, do not need expertise in the areas they teach -- they read from scripts. Instructors do not need teaching experience or even college degrees in most cases.

Unlike school learning, which focuses on facts, formulas, definitions, vocabulary -- that is, content -- a good test prep curriculum will teach a strategic outlook. However, even in this one arena, their claim to fame, these companies teach a formulaic approach to strategy (i.e. see, think, do models) rather than true critical thinking. Students with test anxieties do not gain any confidence or substantially improve, and all students find these tips-and-tricks "strategies" useless to their other classes or academic challenges.

Test prep companies are popular in the present climate of standardized test frenzy, but what is standard about them is their mediocre quality and expensive price tags. Better find a tutor you trust and that fits your student.

Learning Centers

Learning centers and tutoring houses are another option for extra help. Some are national chains and many are local, but what they usually have in common -- unlike test prep companies -- is that they hire tutors with experience. In fact, many require an actual teaching certificate.

While that sounds good on paper, it harks back to our issue with schools: content-based learning using drills and memorization, rather than strategic thinking based on problem types. This is particularly acute when preparing for the ACT and SAT, which are reasoning tests, not subject tests.

Many tutoring houses emphasize organization and provide services for the learning disabled, but rarely do they incorporate all 7 learning principles critical to success. In addition, they pay atrocious wages to moonlighting teachers who deserve better, leading to a low retention rate of talented instructors.

Conclusion

As you see, the best tutors are usually those flying solo. These are experienced instructors, working part time because they cherish the opportunity to affect young lives and who maintain a steady pool of students due to their reputations alone. The fact is that private tutoring is the only true competitive market -- instructors know what they're worth, so you get what you pay for.

Whole Tutoring is a collective of private tutors collaborating to improve their skills and offer innovative classes -- not a tutoring business.