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As a speech pathologist who has provided services online for over a decade, if I had a nickel for every time someone asked me, "yeah... but is it as good as if they were in person?" I would have a shocking amount of nickels.
When it comes to online services, the first thing that needs to be said is: I am ethically bound to act if it appears that an online service delivery model is not working. If my student is not progressing at a rate that I would expect if we were working face-to-face at a table, I can't ethically just keep pushing forward. Full stop.
This is the same attitude and philosophy that we carry with us at LD Expert when it comes to tutoring our students online. If it is not working, we do something about it. If the tutor you're interviewing does not have this same view, that is not the tutor you want working with your child.
Before we fully launch into the blog (it feels like we say this every time), there are a few things to say...
Does online tutoring work for everyone? No. Of course not. Humans are humans and there is always nuance and variability.
Are the services provided online always high caliber? Also no. But services in-person can be just as hit or miss.
The rest of this blog is going to focus on the reasons why online tutoring (when done right) is oftentimes an excellent choice for both your student and your family.
Here's a high level overview of what we're covering:
Benefits of Online Tutoring
No Commute
This one is a bit of a time saving no brainer. When you don't have to go anywhere to start tutoring, you save a whole lot of time.
For a lot of students, tutoring isn't just once a week either. This is especially true when they're in a more intensive reading intervention program... So even if your tutor lives only ten minutes away, if you're attending three times a week, that's a minimum of one hour extra spent simply driving.
If you have to wait at the location while your student tutors, this also keeps you away from home while you could be doing a lot of other things like prepping dinner. (But if you need that hour to sit in your car in silence, you won't hear any argument from me.)
As a bit of a tangential perk... Some tutors do come directly to your house, but when you tutor online you don't need to worry about your toilet being scrubbed just in case.
WiFi is Everywhere These Days
If you have to head out of town for another kid's baseball tournament or you're spending a few weeks staying with family out of state, a laptop is an easy thing to pack. With WiFi being accessible nearly everywhere, it's easy to maintain a consistent tutoring schedule while life continues on around you.
This is also a great perk if you have to move. We especially love working with our military families for this reason. When life is being turned on its head, maintaining consistency with a tutor can make a big difference. You're already having to find new doctors, schools, and extracurricular activities, but when you tutor online, it's one less thing to have to find new.
Kids Like Technology
Our kids have grown up speaking tech as a native language. They enjoy spending time on screens, and this allows them the opportunity to practice doing so responsibly. They're much more familiar than a lot of their parents with troubleshooting, and they're really capable of handling the login process on their own after a few attempts.
When their tutor understands the appeal of technology, they're also able to incorporate components that are fun and help hold a student's attention throughout. When you work face-to-face, you are limited to the 'brain breaks' that you have available in your office or that you brought with you. When you work online, you're able to search for individualized videos, games, or activities that appeal directly to the student in front of you.
Technology also allows for things to be easily customized to skill level, too. This means we can quickly create games that a student likes that just so happen to target that exact spelling concept that's been tricky. That leads us to our next point...
Clear Communication and Data Tracking
When you're working in an online setting, clear communication becomes an absolute must. For those of us operating in the virtual realm, we rely heavily on email, texting, and data tracking software.
At LD Expert specifically, we've worked hard to create clear templates for daily notes, progress monitoring within steps, and beginning/end of year testing. This means we're able to easily copy/paste this information into our data tracking software and email it over to you at anytime. Parents are also always able to access data through their own parent login.
This isn't to say that in-person tutors don't do this! Oftentimes though, when you're seeing kids back-to-back in person, it can be challenging to keep up with daily notes. When we were virtually, we're more easily able to plug in data real time -- especially those of us that utilize second monitors.
Common Questions
*Most of these are going to be answered from the perspective of us at LD Expert. All tutors will do things a little bit differently, so these would be great questions to ask the person you're interviewing as a potential tutor.
Do you add in multi-sensory work?
Each tutor will do things a bit differently, but everyone should be incorporating some form of tactile work. For us at LD Expert, we mail materials directly to our students. This means they have a tile board, notebook, and dictation notebook. If we see the need for additional materials like white boards or blank notecards, we send those, too!
Do I have to sit next to my student?
Rarely. The goal is to work towards your student working independently. At the end of the day, they're kids and sometimes we need a little support from a parent to help facilitate a lesson or a task.
This one also depends heavily upon the kid. For some students, we don't ever need a parent, but others really benefit from the support of a parent next to them to help keep them on task.
This is a large reason a lot of parents don't like the idea of online tutoring. They don't really want to sit and monitor their child or facilitate keeping them on task. I get that. What I can say is this: The tutors we have at LD Expert are exceptional at their job. They know how to help kids. They're also very good at managing expectations and working with parents to create an environment that is predictable and that - over time - will result in the parent having to be less involved.
How do you help kids who need attention-related support?
The "LD" in LD Expert stands for learning differences. We specialize in understanding students who have unique learning profiles, and a lot of our students have ADHD. We also remember and recognize that - no matter the diagnosis or difference - these are kids. Most of them have spent all day at school and are a little (or a lot) fried. They really all do arrive benefitting from attention-related support.
At times, this looks like frequent 'brain breaks' where we pull up and away from the task at hand to give our brains a moment of relief. I like to compare this to spin class. If anyone has ever been pedaling hard, you understand the very deep desire to just stand up for one tiny second to give yourself some relief. That's how these kids can feel -- they're working so hard on the thing that is already so hard, so these small breaks sprinkled throughout give them the chance to truly keep grinding until the end of our tutoring session.
Other times this can look like allowing the student to work standing up, swiveling, or wiggling.
What we also find to be helpful is educating our kids on how brains work, especially their own. We help them learn to identify when they're beginning to drift towards needing a break. They learn to request them and eventually their stamina increases between breaks, or the breaks themselves become naturally shorter.
We also learn how to recognize cues in these kids and an important question can be: "does your brain feel like it can learn something new right now?" If the answer is no, we explore what we can do to help get into a learning state of mind. We never shame the need for attention-related support because the reality is we all need it at times.
What if there are tech issues?
Short answer: We help you.
Because we've all chosen to work virtually, we all have some level of comfort troubleshooting when it comes to technology. At LD Expert though, it's not just one tutor trying to figure things out, there is a team of us. If your tutor isn't able to help directly, Steph or I get involved until we find the solution.
Oftentimes, it's as simple as running an update and rebooting the computer, but if tech issues persist, we work to get to the bottom of it. We've yet to encounter a situation that we could find solution.
If there are WiFi-related tech issues, there is also very affordable boosting equipment that can be purchased to eliminate the issue.
How do I really know if this is working?
For most OG-based programs, there are timelines that can be roughly followed when it comes to looking for progress. That being said, every student is so incredibly different and there are a lot of factors that contribute to how quickly we see growth. (For example: Are we starting from the very beginning? Are we unlearning guessing habits that the student used to survive school? Does this student have reduced processing speed?)
At LD Expert, we take data when you begin, within lessons, at the end of steps, and at the end of the year. This means that we're able to grab data consistently and look for trends. All of our tutors are certified teachers or speech pathologists, so we're able to share with you what would expect to see and compare it to what we're actually seeing.
We've also worked with over 275 families and we've tracked all their data, too. We're able to compare data in large general terms, but then also able to compare students that have similar profiles to see if we're moving at an expected rate.
The truth of OG-based programs though is that progress is often slow, especially at the beginning. It takes a lot of time to begin to chip away previously learned bad habits. We also often have to start at the beginning of their figurative race course. If a kid is racing along a track and consistently gets caught in the same spot, we need to fill that in. For a lot of these kids, there are surprising - seemingly 'easy' - concepts that have never fully been learned (through absolutely no fault of their own), but we owe it to them to close all the gaps. The way we tackle large, multisyllabic words is based upon our knowledge of what to do with smaller ones.
If you're a regular tutoring client, we still take data and can provide standardized tests or comprehensive assessments in order to track progress, too.
How do I choose a tutor?
Excellent question. You interview several of them and then make an educated decision based on the data you've gathered. Not sure what questions you're even supposed to be asking? You're not alone! We've made a free interview guide and checklist for you to compare. You can grab it here: https://www.ldexpert.org/downloadable-resources
The Ideal Online Setup
For many adults, it's still hard to wrap our heads around how working online can actually work. During the pandemic, a lot of us were left with a bad taste in our mouths. When it comes to a previous bad experience during the pandemic (or even with a sub-par tutor after the pandemic), we invite you to consider the following: There is a very large difference between being forced into online teaching during a global pandemic, and choosing to work online as a career.
I've been in this virtual realm for a decade and I have met, evaluated, and treated thousands of kids. I have worked with students who were non-speaking, students who had multiple diagnoses and very real health challenges, students who attended school virtually because of bullying, students with PDA, and kids who were home alone somehow babysitting their siblings while still trying to participate in speech therapy online... so I'm speaking from experience and hopefully with some professional authority here when I say: with the right tutor, there are very few students for which online tutoring "doesn't work."
Because of that experience, and because of all the feedback from our team of teachers, we've also found the scenarios that help create the most success. It's fairly simple, too.
When working online, this is ideally what we'd like to see:
A quiet, private space to work without distraction.
Distractions include: pets, siblings, cell phones, or games running in the background of the computer. (Students are always shocked when we can tell they're playing a game... It never seems to cross their mind that if they're wearing glasses we can see the game reflected on their eyeballs.)
Arriving to tutoring with all materials organized and accessible.
We can easily lose five minutes a lesson if we're constantly having to hunt for the things we need. Keep all their materials in a tote or container so they can grab them right before it's time to start.
Restart the computer before each lesson.
This helps two big things: (1) a slow moving computer that has too many things running and (2) games being opened in the background.
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