Qualified Teachers Bring Priceless Experience to a Tutoring Lesson

At Hoot Reading, our tutors are all qualified teachers meaning when we look for teachers to join our network, we look for a combination of degrees, classroom experience, and specialized certifications and high-quality professional development experiences. This ensures that the students on the other side of our lessons are working with the person who we believe can best meet their needs. 

A tutor doesn’t have to be a classroom teacher to be an effective literacy tutor. However, we have found many moments over this year’s 180,000+ lessons of tutoring where we saw strong teaching experience come in and make learning more accessible and enjoyable for our students and families. 

74% of teachers in the Hoot Reading Network have Advanced Degrees

50% have More than 10 Years of Classroom Experience

Experienced teachers serve students who require extra support.

We’re thrilled that 30% of the teachers in our network are certified in Special Education or English as a Second Language (ESL). This allows us to match students with tutors strategically, based on their needs. Regardless of certification status, classroom teachers with years of experience have already worked with students who require and benefit from accommodations in literacy instruction. The same strategies that they have used to make learning inclusive and accessible in their classrooms translates to the 1:1 tutoring environment.

Furthermore, an experienced teacher is likely to pick up on the signs that a student could benefit from support with something beyond the content. For example, a student might wear glasses normally, but is not wearing them in lessons.  

Experienced teachers are experienced communicators. 

Tutors who have spent years in the classroom have honed their communication skills by talking about instruction to different stakeholders. From working in teams with their peers across grade levels and content areas, as well as through instructional meetings with coaches, specialists and school administrators, tutors know how to ask for the specific support they require or make suggestions and recommendations that would allow them to improve their practice. This helps the Hoot Reading team to continue to source, create or modify the books and instructional materials in our library, develop needs-based professional development courses and provide student-specific advice and recommendations. 

Even more importantly, our tutors have deep experience in communicating with parents and families, translating technical literacy terms and instructional jargon into digestible and actionable feedback for families. The experience over the years also allows Hoot Reading’s teacher network to put a concerned caregiver at ease, normalizing situations that they see everyday. They also have developed tactful ways to ask parents for more (or less!) support during a lesson. 

And most importantly of all, tutors who are teachers know how to talk to children, because they have spent years doing so. Experienced teacher tutors aren’t easily rattled by a sleepy student, a tooth falling out, a younger sibling making an appearance, or the difficult emotions that are present when a student has struggled to read in the past. This is where experience comes in to offer awareness, wisdom, and compassion on the road to learning. 

It’s this reason why we are so passionate about teacher-led tutoring, and extremely grateful for the experienced and excellent teachers in the Hoot Reading Network.