New Humanity Availability Feature, Outstanding Student Feedback Award, and Reminders

Hi, everyone,

We hope that you have had a great week! Our session volume remains predictably low, but student feedback has been strong: ratings this week are 96% positive – several points higher than usual. Amazing work everyone! Please take time to read through the remainder of this post which includes an introduction to a new humanity feature, a celebration of excellent work, and reminders.

Humanity Availability Feature

This week, we will be introducing some changes to our scheduling processes. In the past, we’ve used a combination of google forms and individual tutor outreach to determine everyone’s scheduled hours. Moving forward, we are going to replace this process by using the Availability feature on Humanity.

A little more context for this change: we’ve heard a couple of big pain points from tutors with our current system:

  • Tutors must schedule in 3-hour minimum chunks when they may only have one or two hours of availability within a time window. For example, you may want to work 2-4 pm on Tuesday, but you’re only allowed to indicate 12-3 pm OR 3-6 pm on our google form.
  • Schedule changes are granted upon request, requiring tutors to proactively reach out to us and negotiate for hours. This hasn’t been very efficient or equitable.

Using the Humanity availability feature will give you greater control over the time that you are available to tutor with us each week. It will also allow all tutors the same opportunity to adjust their preferred hours in real-time.

A few things to note about the flexibility of the system:

  • You will be able to set recurring availability. So if you will have about the same availability each week, you do not have to change anything after your initial setup. But you can if you would like to.
  • You will continue to be able to pick up open shifts or trades even if they are within the timeframe that you had set as unavailable. 

While there may be slightly more variability in your scheduled hours each week, you will have control over when you are able to work for Yup. The more availability, particularly during peak hours (typically between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. PDT during the school year), the greater potential of reaching your TGP maximum weekly hours.

Please follow the steps outlined below to set your availability for the week of Monday, June 27 – Sunday, July 3. You must set your availability by Wednesday, June 22rd at 8:00 a.m. PDT. If you do not indicate your availability by this time, you will be scheduled for any time frame.

Moving forward the deadline for updating your availability for the following week will be Thursdays at 12:00 p.m. PDT. If you set recurring availability, you can reduce or eliminate the need to make changes each week. 

For all of the processes listed below, there is a video showing the step-by-step process at the bottom of the list.

Set availability:

The process below shows you how to block off time that you are unavailable for shifts on Humanity.

  1. Log in to your Humanity account.
  2. Click Set Availability on the left side of your dashboard
  3. Hover over a date and time on the calendar till you see a plus sign appear.
  4. Click the plus for an hour that you would like to indicate that you are unavailable.
  5. Adjust the time frame 
  6. Click Save.

Set recurring availability:

If you know that you will be unavailable at the same time every week or multiple days every week, you can indicate the time slot as unavailable for recurring days or weeks.

  1. Repeat steps 1-5 from Set Availability above
  2. Click the drop-down menu “Does not Repeat”
  3. Select the frequency that you would like the time slot to be marked unavailable. (Repeats Weekly, Repeats bi-weekly, Repeats Monthly).
  4. Select the days of the week that you would like the time slot to be marked unavailable.
  5. Click Save

Editing availability:

Once you have blocked off a time slot and it displays as unavailable, the only way to edit or adjust the time slot is to delete it and set a new time. To delete:

  1. Click the time slot that is displayed in light red on your availability calendar.
  2. Click the trash can icon.
  3. If this is from a time slot that you had set up as recurring you will be asked if you want to delete this one occurrence or all future occurrences.

 

Outstanding Student Feedback Award

Congratulations to Pralhad Mohan Shinde for earning the Outstanding Student Feedback Award! This award is given to tutors who receive consistent, outstanding written feedback from students over several weeks along with demonstrating excellent overall performance. Students respond positively to Pralhad’s fun and encouraging tone. His kind tone also creates an environment where students feel willing to take intellectual risks.

Some of Pralhad’s exceptional student feedback comments include:

  • “Thanks for helping me out today!! I really needed help with factoring and you helped!”
  • “Thanks for helping me again today!!”
  • “Very patient and will stay till the end until you understand”
  • “Thanks for making everything simple!! I didn’t understand it but now I do!”
  • “Mr. Shinde made it easy for my math problem :D”
  • “Really helpful I understood the lesson really quickly with his help”

Way to go, Pralhad!

Reminders

Building Rapport Training Reminder and Improving the End-of-Session Experience

Building Rapport Training Reminder

Just wanted to give a quick reminder to finish the Building Rapport Training by today. If you’re having trouble remembering your PlayPosit login credentials, please reach out to Sharon!

Improving the End-of-Session Experience

We appreciate your ongoing feedback on our learning standards; each of you has been flexible as we adapt to what’s best for students and reasonable for tutors to accomplish in each session. As a result, students are engaging with extension questions, explaining concepts in their own words, and viewing problems from multiple perspectives. Way to go!

As we speak with tutors and customers, we’ve also heard that students are often leaving sessions while being asked to Check and Reflect, and that they sometimes feel uncomfortable signing off and disappointing the tutor. While we know that tutors are trying to get students to synthesize their learning, we also want to make sure that the session ends on a positive note. 

To help with this, we’ve provided some examples of abrupt endings and suggestions for improving the session experience for everyone. Click here to see how to End Each Session on a Win. If you have any feedback, please email Sharon and Kreg – we’d love to hear from you and know if we’re on the right track.

Thanks again for your continued hard work and enjoy the weekend!

UPSCR Changes and Post-session Comments

UPSCR Changes

Can you believe it’s been over 3 months since we rolled out UPSCR?! 

Based on your feedback and internal session reviews, we’re excited to announce the following changes, which should be introduced this week:

  • Adding in N/As for each point (not just each strand) 
  • More lenient with Plan and Check
  • Changing the overall rubric slightly
  • Changing the protocol for Answer Check (Clarification Question) sessions 

Please read the details of the changes here.

Post-Session Comments

As part of our school partnerships, we send regular updates featuring a student spotlight and a Yup tip. This increases student engagement and empowers every student to learn. Please help by providing positive and constructive feedback on the post-session screen to ensure that teachers can hear from the tutors who work with their students! 

To ensure the best comments possible, please review our PlayPosit training. We expect that all tutors take this training. You will be paid 45 minutes for the satisfactory completion of the training. Please let Sharon know if you experience any issues with PlayPosit.

UPSCR Grading and Student Feedback Policy Updates

As promised, we have fleshed out our plans for grading policy changes over near- and long-term. Here are the upcoming changes:

Immediate Policy Updates

Remove the student feedback channel

  • Tracking students individually is a manual and unscalable task
  • The channel has shifted away from its purpose of providing tips on how to work with students and towards understandable, but ultimately unproductive, venting; we would like Yup tutors to enter each session on a “blank slate” with students
  • As we move to school focus, we will explore other forms of feedback
  • You are still welcome to message Henry/Sharon individually about major concerns with student behavior

Continue removing scores from misaligned students

  • As in June, we intend to remove scores from misaligned students based on internal investigation for July; this has the most impact without undue manual/engineering work

Near Term Policy Updates

Formalize TQM ability to nullify a session

  • We will be changing the first question from “Did the tutor ask instructional questions?” to “Was student engagement reasonably within the tutor’s control?” at the start of each session feedback; TQMs may select “No” and nullify the session
  • TQMs will undergo training and norming process to ensure grading is fair; however, we will continue to not allow disputes

Long Term Policy Updates

Engineering to add nulls by strand feature

  • In the coming months, we will introduce a feature to allow TQMs to score certain strands and not others based on student engagement

Yup Resource Spotlight

We’ve had a number of requests regarding how we onboard teachers and students and introduce UPSCR. We’ll be releasing materials weekly so that you can see how your hard work is translated in the classroom!

For week one, check out our Pitch Deck: what we go through with schools during introductory calls!

Vacation

And finally, the Yup HQ team will be taking some hard earned vacation!

  • Henry: 7/20-7/24 (shift auditing may be delayed, no newsfeed post)
  • Sharon: 7/27-7/31
  • Kreg: 7/23-7/24

Confirming UPSCR Rollout And Special Q&A

Hi Yup Tutors. We hope you’re excited for the Summer period!

Update on the UPSCR Rollout Process

June 1: 4/1 – 5/31 TGP metrics confirmed, TGP levels updated for Summer; UPSCR grading officially goes into effect

June 5: May payroll distributed

June 8: New UPSCR tutor workbooks rolled out with June data

UPSCR Cutoffs

Please see below for the new UPSCR cutoffs. This reflects current tutor performance. We anticipate scores rising as tutors become more comfortable with UPSCR and students become more aligned with the process. We’ll review this policy and update cutoffs as needed.

Cycle

Level Description All Sessions Cycle Score
5 Quality Manager 500 7.5
4 Master Yup Tutor 300 6.5
3 Distinguished Yup Tutor 100 5.0
2 Yup Tutor 25 3.0
1 New Yup Tutor 0 N/A

Monthly Bonus

Tier Description Graded Sessions Monthly Score
2 Exemplary 15 TQM: 8.0

Non-TQM: 7.5

1 Strong 10 TQM: 7.5

Non-TQM: 6.5

Announcing Q&A With Director of Academics Kreg Moccia

We’re excited to announce an open Q&A with Kreg, our Director of Academics! Please use this link both to submit questions and upvote ones you find interesting from today until June 1. Kreg will respond as quickly as possible (we anticipate a response to ~1 question per day) in the Yup Chat channel in Tutor Slack.