Effective Practices Provided by Education Northwest (formerly the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory) and Bank Street College of Education: LEARNS
Focus: Educational Success and Mentoring
- Anticipating outcomes when designing a tutoring program
- Assessing the qualifications of prospective tutors
- Building a support system for tutors
- Building partnerships to form strong literacy projects
- Building sustainable partnerships with schools: three key strategies for mentoring programs
- Connecting incarcerated parents and their children through inmates' recorded readings of books
- Creating an exercise for youth on the importance of service
- Creating partnerships between schools and communities to support youth development
- Designing programs to increase tutoring effectiveness
- Developing curricula and tutoring strategies to meet grant guidelines
- Engaging at-risk youth in leadership development
- Expanding youth employment opportunities with an entrepreneurial endeavor
- Exploring life's options with informational interviews
- Finding free or inexpensive books
- Finding tutor trainers
- Getting parents involved with tutoring efforts
- Helping children learn to read
- Identifying features of high-performing after-school programs
- Incorporating ten strategies to achieve a balanced approach to tutoring
- Increasing awareness of local RSVP and recruitment of 50+ adult volunteers with RSVP ambassadors
- Increasing qualified tutor applicants by linking to a university financial aid website
- Mentoring youth to make positive life decisions
- Motivating reluctant adolescent readers
- Outlining steps for planning, implementing, and assessing a service-learning project
- Partnering with county extension agents to train mentors
- Performing background checks on potential mentors
- Planning annual Foster Grandparent in-service training
- Preparing mentors to work with older foster youth
- Preparing parents for the mentoring experience
- Preventing common adolescent at-risk behaviors with early intervention
- Providing ongoing tutor training and support
- Providing summertime contact in school-based mentoring programs
- Putting research about young readers into practice
- Recruiting diverse seniors as tutors
- Recruiting male mentors
- Screening potential volunteers
- Selecting appropriate books to read with children
- Setting standards for tutors in literacy programs
- Streamlining program management and reporting with informational packets for site coordinators
- Suggesting ideas to families to encourage reading and writing at home
- Training literacy tutors
- Training parents and volunteers in storytelling
- Tutoring English language learners
- Understanding how children learn to read
- Using a learning management system to offer low-cost online training
- Using an observation period to train new tutors
- Using hands-on project-based learning to build intergenerational relationships
- Using high school students as tutors in a service-learning project
- Using teams of senior volunteers for literacy tutoring
- Using the school calendar to connect tutors and parents
- Using Web 2.0 technologies in youth service programs
Additional effective practices related to literacy and mentoring.
