Introduction

For the past month, I have been a small-group tutor on a platform called Schoolhouse.  Schoolhouse     was created by Sal Khan, the creator of Khan Academy, and is in an active partnership with the College Board to research how peer tutoring programs can affect SAT scores. I wanted to write about how I became a tutor, what I was required to do, and what I got out of teaching others.

How and why did I become a tutor?

This past November, I took the SAT and scored highly. Since both my math and reading section scores were above the national 90th percentile, I qualified to become a peer tutor for Schoolhouse and received an email from the College Board with an invitation to host a SAT bootcamp course for the March SAT. I decided to tutor because I figured that the best way to test if you truly know something is by your ability to teach it. Specifically, I chose to host a math SAT bootcamp because math is my favorite school subject. 

What training did I have to go through to become a tutor?

To become a tutor, I had to complete multiple training sessions through Typeform, where I was taught the pedagogy, rules and regulations, and curriculum of Schoolhouse. I then had to attend an SAT tutor onboarding session hosted by someone with experience hosting multiple SAT bootcamp on the platform. In essence, Schoolhouse is all about active learning: they believe that most of the time students should be solving the problems, not the tutor, and this was reinforced multiple times throughout my training.

How was the SAT bootcamp structured?

The SAT bootcamp took place over a four week period, with two sessions per week. I hosted my sessions on Saturday and Sunday at 6:00 PM on the Zoom platform, which has an annotation tool useful for communicating with students. Most of the sessions focused on a specific domain of the Math section, of which there are four: algebra, advanced math, problem-solving and data analysis, and geometry and trigonometry. In each session, I would do the first problem on my own, and for the rest of the questions, my students were the ones doing the solving. Towards the end of a session, my students would take a shortened practice test through a form on the Schoolhouse website, and after they completed it I would answer any questions they had from it. 

Was there a lot of prep involved?

No, preparing for each session was not tedious, and never took me more than an hour to complete. The slide format I used was premade by Schoolhouse. All I had to do was find practice questions for my students to answer, using an official College Board application, the SAT suite Question Bank. The SAT Suite Question Bank contains over 3500 practice SAT questions, and contains unique ones not found on the Bluebook practice exams. 

Did I think it was useful and would I do it again?

I thought that tutoring on Schoolhouse was definitely worth it. It was very interesting to work with a group of students across the country and see firsthand how the math education curriculum differs from state to state. I felt that I, as well as my students, learned a lot of tips on how to tackle SAT math problems, like how to write out equations or use advanced techniques with the graphing software Desmos. I also got 15 community service hours out of it. I am certainly going to host another bootcamp next month!