Tutorial periods have become a long-established part of the Woodside schedule, but while they’re here to stay, some teachers think there’s still room for improvement.
Tutorials are 35-minute periods after lunch on all school days but Wednesday that gives students the opportunity to catch up on work, check in with teachers or otherwise do something productive.
“I think [that] tutorial is extremely useful and helpful for students who use it,” English teacher Grant Guzman said. “I think that having that 35 minutes act as a buffer in the middle of the day really allows the students who maximize their time to process and plan what they’re going to get done.”
Karen Dorsey, the world department chair and a Spanish teacher, is also a big fan of tutorials, but she thinks there are a couple of things about it that could be improved.
“I don’t love that students who leave early never want to come to tutorials,” Dorsey said. “That’s the [one of the only things] I don’t love about it.”
Guzman said that if there’s something he would want to change about tutorial, it would be the rule that a student has to stay in a classroom the entire tutorial period.
“Sometimes a student will come and see me, they’ll get help and they’ll get their question answered within the next five or ten minutes, but then they have to stay the entire period, even though they no longer need my assistance anymore and they would like to get back to their other teacher and work,” Guzman said.
Dorsey also said students should be able to go to more than one tutorial so they can use their time wisely.
“Most of my students have a lot of things going on, so to only be able to go to one tutorial, even if they need to see more than one person [I think that’s important to change],” Dorsey said.
Under the current tutorial system, Woodside expects students to stay in one classroom for the full 35-minute tutorial period. Students should go to their sixth or seventh-period classroom for tutorial unless previously arranged with a teacher.
“I think the idea was that if you start changing classes, then teachers are going to be continuously getting interrupted,” Charles Velschow, one of the two administrative vice principals, said. “Any good classroom management has kind of a definitive beginning in which you get everybody on task, you get everybody started, you set the expectations and then you have that go for the next 30 minutes or 35 minutes. If you constantly have kids leaving, coming and going, it creates a bit of a distraction.”
Velschow said that they’re looking into the ability for students to change classrooms about one time per tutorial for next semester. He said this would be a minor tweak and if kids were getting better use of the time in tutorial because of it, it would be a good addition.
“Obviously, the thing we don’t want is kids wandering around,” Velschow said.
Still, Dorsey said that tutorial is way better than before it existed, where teachers had to give up their lunch or stay after school to check in with students. Guzman agreed with Dorsey and shared the previous form of tutorial which was Sustained Silent Reading, where students had to read silently for 35 minutes straight.
“I personally did not like [Sustained Silent Reading] because it made me feel more like a babysitter or policeman,” Guzman said. “Students I had did not enjoy it because they had work that they wanted to get finished.”
Velschow, who was on the committee that helped replace sustained silent reading with tutorials, said that tutorial teaches students how to use their free time in the day wisely like adults.
“If we can train kids to take those 35 minutes and get some homework done, or connect with the teachers so that you’re not having to do that after school, I think that’s a good thing,” Velschow said.
