Early Literacy Tutor Training Recipe Book

Sequencing of Content Areas

While research supports prioritizing each of the four core content areas below, the order of the content areas in the training sequence depends on a provider’s mission, the profile of their tutors, and the children and communities they serve. For example, providers might choose the following order:

Culturally Responsive and Sustaining Education

Building Relationships with Young Children

How Children Learn to Read and How Adults Teach Them to Do So

Supporting the Whole Child

Providers that choose this order might do so because they have an equity-grounded mission and have taken and reflected upon the Tutor Quality Improvement System, which revealed several areas for growth in tutor recruitment and training. For example, providers might realize that incoming tutors need to build or strengthen asset-based, productive orientations toward why tutoring is needed in this community and with all the children served. Providers know that building these orientations and initial reflective habits in tutors first will influence how they take in and make meaning of the information about teaching language and literacy and supporting the whole child later. In training, tutors need to begin with self-reflection, a mainstay activity of a tutor who wants to build a trusting relationship with a child, particularly one that crosses some line of difference. That self-reflection will be more effective if it happens through a culturally responsive lens.

Providers with existing strength in the area of equity may choose that same order, wanting to deepen that commitment and/or ensure that every entering class of tutors builds these equity-centered foundations. Alternatively, these providers might choose a different order:

How Children Learn to Read and How Adults Teach Them to Do So

Supporting the Whole Child

Culturally Responsive and Sustaining Education

Building Relationships with Young Children

Providers that choose this order might do so because they believe their tutors will benefit most from learning about literacy goals first, as that is the content area to address a significant area for growth, based on tutors’ entering profiles. Providers might choose this order because they have insight into their tutors’ entering orientations toward why tutoring is needed in the community, know they are asset-based, and thus believe it’s less critical to begin with the goals related to culturally responsive and sustaining education. This may be more common for providers that recruit tutors from the communities in which they will tutor.

There are other ways to order the goals in a training sequence. What matters is that providers use data and/or research to inform their choices in an effort to build the most effective training sequence for tutors, so as to best prepare them to support all the children they serve.