Most of you tutor or are thinking about starting a tutoring business. At your core is the desire to help someone overcome an obstacle. Today we’re going to talk about one of our success stories and hopefully it will give you some tips for helping you to become a better tutor. It should also help to build and grow your business.
We’ve talked some about our NCLEX tutor business. You can check out the website here – http://www.nclexreviewonline.com/
Nothing fancy but it works. If you want to see some of the inner workings you can find a link for 24 free access here at the bottom of the page – http://www.nclexreviewonline.com/nclex-boot-camp-nclex-review-course/
We tutor students who are preparing to take the NCLEX test, we found as we talked to prospective students, many of them had failed the NCLEX test previously.
Talk to prospective customers – you may think you know what your market is, the only way you can know for sure is to test it and then talk to prospective customers. There are a couple of ways you can talk to them, one of the best ways I found was to create an information form and after a student filled it out, then you have permission to engage with them. One of the best questions you can add to your form is what they expect you to do for them.
Make it easy for someone to get in touch with you.
Someone did this, she had taken the LPN NCLEX test previously and had failed. She asked could we tutor LPNS (the site is setup for RNS). I told her that I would do some research and found the tests are very similar. The first thing we did was a good assessment.
Assess your students – the more you learn their strengths and weaknesses the better you’ll be able to help them. During your assessment you want to find out all you can about your prospective student. This lady has six children and works a full time job. I learned she wanted to be an LPN so she could better provide for her family – that motivated me. If you only tutor for money, you will fail. I know that sounds harsh, but it is true. Tutoring is not easy, but it is very rewarding.
I found out from (we’ll call her B) that she had taken the NCLEX and the test had ended (it can last five hours) and she sent me the results. She had almost passed. We needed to focus on getting her to answer questions quicker. Language was a problem too since she was not a native English speaker. We tutored her for a month. Most of our sessions began at 4 or 5 in the morning. I think I was her wake up call. We focused on her weaknesses and I noticed improvement as we continued.
I also encouraged her as much as I could.
Encourage your students. Even the small accomplishments, tell them they are doing a good job. Every student I’ve ever tutored, loves it when they are complimented.
Also one of the problems she had was she had taken another course that was all about dissecting the questions. We figured out this was why she answered questions so slowly, we retrained her to forget that and just answer the questions.
Our last tutor session was on a Saturday afternoon. This session we spent most of the time encouraging her and giving her some last minute tips and pointers. I asked her if she would like to talk again before the test and she did. Monday afternoon I called her on the way to take the test. I reminded her of all the work we had done (she had answered thousands of practice questions) and told her to relax. She called me when the test was over. She was upset. The test had turned off after only 3 hours. I reminded her this was a good thing. She also mentioned the questions were hard (again a good thing). This was the note I got from her yesterday.
“Pass Pass Thank you God bless you and your wonderful family.”
I did the happy dance.
Evaluate and Adjust – for each student you’re tutoring you should be taking careful notes. Every student is different, but many things are the same. For example, we know a lot about the NCLEX test, we have found that answering good test questions help people to pass the test. We also use assessment tests and if they make a certain score, then they will likely pass the test. One of the other things with any tutor student is figuring out what motivates them and how to help calm them down when they are taking a test.
We love hearing questions from you. Enjoy your day!