Category: Tutoring 101: Do’s and Don’ts

Login Change + Feedback Award & Reminders

⚠️ UPCOMING DASHBOARD LOGIN CHANGE ⚠️

On Friday, June 28th, we will be switching to a new login system for tutors. Instead of using your phone number to log in, you will be required to use your email address and password.

When the new system is deployed, please complete the following steps:

  1.  Log out of the dashboard
  2. Click the Reset Password link at yup.com/users/sign-in
  3. Enter your Yup-associated email address
  4. Check your email for a reset password link
  5. Follow the instructions to set your password
  6. Login using the new method!

It’s important that you update your password before it’s time to log into your next shift following the update next week – this will ensure that no sessions are dropped as a result of tutors being unable to login.

If you don’t remember which email is associated with your Yup account OR you wish to change it, please email tutor.support@yup.com as soon as possible.

GENERAL REMINDERS

Submitting Disputes:

  • Please limit disputes to three per month (based on when the session occurred), and submit within a week of when the session was conducted
  • Please stick to the guidelines for dispute eligibility: sessions that earned less than 8 points; sessions tagged Gave/Wrong Answer or  Content Knowledge.
  • Please do your best to explain why you feel you were inaccurately scored.

Answer Check Policy:

  • Reminder that we should only ask a student for their work/thought process once – if they refuse, please proceed with checking answers rather than continuing to press. (Relevant newsfeed post.)

Shift End Policy:

  • If you are with a student when your shift ends, you should only end the session if 1) you have found an answer together after your shift has ended OR 2) you have worked with the student for 30 minutes past the end of your shift (Relevant newsfeed post.)
  • When ending a session for one of the above reasons, please let the student know you have worked past the end of your shift (feel free to use a canned response for this!)
  • This policy was created to avoid poor student experiences near the end of a tutor’s shift. If your schedule does not allow you to follow this policy, email scheduling@yup.com

OUTSTANDING STUDENT FEEDBACK AWARD

Congratulations to Surinder Kaur 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.

Some of Surinder’s exceptional student feedback comments:

  • “Thank you so much! Made a stressful night with a lot of hard problems much easier. I hope I get you again soon!”
  • “I would love to be paired up with her again. It was a very productive and fast session.”
  • “Thank you so much Ms. Kaur lol now because of you I can go to the theme park with my friends!!! Yay!”
  • “This question was on my recent SAT so thank you for helping me understand how I could have done it :)”

Happy tutoring!

— Team Yup

New Feature + General Reminders

NEW FEATURE: IN-SESSION PROMPTS

Yup tutors have a lot to do in-session. Remembering which tools to utilize and when, using growth mindset language, and typing quickly – all while teaching math and adapting to students’ needs! This role requires a significant cognitive load, and with so many specifics to remember we know it isn’t easy to stay on top of everything.

In-Session Prompts are designed to encourage appropriate use of teaching tools and growth mindset language. The feature will prompt you when it’s appropriate to use these levers:

We hope this will increase student satisfaction and learning while making your job easier. As you notice the prompts this week, please tell us what you think in the #new-ideas Slack channel! We review comments regularly to inform future feature requests and changes.

GENERAL REMINDERS

  • Is your student using an unfamiliar or unusual solution method? Avoid discrediting the student or their teacher’s method, which could come off as rude or disrespectful.  Instead, ask for a snap of their notes or textbook to gain more insight into the method or check with #tutor-chat (or Google) for support!
  • Coverage Reminders: Both Riemann Sums and calculating volume with integrals fall within Yup’s concept coverage. Please take a moment to brush up on these concepts if you are not already familiar.

 

Happy Tutoring!

— Team Yup

Scheduling Reminders + Achievements

SCHEDULING REMINDERS

As many of you know, the Yup Tutor Operations team recently welcomed a new member, Henry Grunzweig, to manage hiring and scheduling. Henry is delighted to be working with you all! As he takes on this new role, here are a few reminders to help make the scheduling system run smoothly for everyone:

  • Take care to click the “End Shift” button when finishing shift to ensure we are accurately logging your shift time. Refreshing the page after clicking will confirm if the shift is ended.
  • Whenever possible, please use the Scheduling Form to let us know about shift changes rather than emailing scheduling@yup.com directly. For shift takeovers, both tutors are expected to submit a form. Take care to ensure all the information in the form is correct to avoid confusion (AM vs. PM and Pacific Time zone for example.)
  • Avoid claiming new shifts unless you are confident you will be able to commit to covering them. For temporary available shifts, check the Claimed Shifts sheet to see which shifts you have claimed.

ACHIEVEMENTS ANALYSIS

We recently worked with a data analyst and PhD student out of Stanford University to learn more about how our new Achievements feature impacts student learning. Here are some of the findings from the session analysis that we are excited to share.

Students who receive an Achievement are more likely to:

  • Reach Gap Bridged
  • Give the session a ‘Thumbs Up’/5-Star rating
  • Tag a session as “Fast Teaching” or “Fast Typing“
  • Return to the app for another session

Overall, trends suggest that students have a more enjoyable experience when they earn achievements!

Here are our top Achievement senders since the feature launch:

  1. Mark Leibtog – 1560 achievements sent
  2. Usharani PV – 1444 achievements sent
  3. Kristine Dale Alcaide – 815 achievements sent

Great work, tutors! Going forward, let’s aim to not only send multiple achievements in every session, but to use authentic language when sending them. For example rather than saying “Here – take a Great Grit badge!“, explaining “Way to push through a tough problem – you earned a Great Grit achievement 🙂” will  make the experience more meaningful for the student.

Happy tutoring!

— Team Yup

Session Accuracy + Reminders

ENSURING SESSION ACCURACY

As an education platform, allowing incorrect answers to slip through the cracks violates a fundamental trust for the students and parents depending on our service. Unfortunately, the Wrong Answer tag is one of the most frequently assigned session tags by TQMs.

A recent Ops Analysis uncovered the following data points:

  • More than 50% of Wrong Answer tags happen when a tutor doesn’t thoroughly check a student’s work
  • About 15% of Wrong Answer tags stem from a tutor failing to follow given instructions

This analysis has shown us that the majority of Wrong Answer tags can be easily prevented by following directions and checking work thoroughly. Below is an infographic from 2018 with more tips and reminders:

QUICK REMINDERS

  • Referral Program:
    • Thank you for your interest in the Tutor Referral program thus far! Just a reminder that we’ve extended our trial until April 5th – keep referring tutors to earn up to $125 for yourself and up to $75 for the referred tutor! Learn More
  • Outdated Apps:
    • A number of in-session issues we’ve seen become more prevalent can be easily fixed by the student by updating their app.
      • Two specific issues caused by outdated apps are missing or disabled achievement buttons and duplicated session messages.
    • When you notice the above errors, asking the student to update their app – at the end of the session – will ensure they are having the best possible experience.

 

Happy Tutoring!

— Team Yup

Bug Reporting Procedure + Updates/Reminders

NEW BUG REPORTING PROCEDURE

Starting immediately, we ask that you use the Tutor Dashboard’s built-in Report Bug button to let us know about technical issues you face.

We invite you to continue to use the #system_issues room on slack to communicate with other tutors about bugs after reporting via Report Bug (UserSnap).  Additionally, if a bug you are facing is significantly impacting your shift, please continue to let us know via tutor.support@yup.com.

Using the ‘REPORT BUG’ Button (UserSnap)

STEP 1
Click the ‘Report Bug’ button on the bottom right of your tutor dashboard to launch the bug reporting screen.

STEP 2
Use the pen tool to mark your screenshot if necessary and use the comment box to tell us more about the bug.

        • Do your best to be as detailed as possible about how the bug presented itself, and/or how it affected the session, or your experience using the platform (even if you think the screenshot is self-explanatory!)
        • For example, instead of saying the session is lagging, try saying messages/images/whiteboard are taking a long time to send, or messages are out of order/repeating in the session.
        • Always include your email, the date, time and time zone in order to better find and investigate bugs reported.

STEP 3
Click “Send” when you are done illustrating and explaining the bug that you are experiencing.

Check out the Yup Bug Reporting Instructions doc for more details.

TUTORING UPDATES/REMINDERS

  • PRE-SESSION QUESTION TIP
    • Use the canned responses filed under Initial Probing along with the student’s answers to the pre-session questions to speed up Gap Clarification Phase.
      • For example, if they indicate that have solved similar problems, you might utilize the following canned response:“Looks like you’ve done similar problems before! Based on those, do you have any ideas about what we could try here?”
  • ACHIEVEMENTS UPDATE
    • As of this month, Yup tutors have sent over 15,000 Achievements to students! The team’s favorite Achievement to send is All-Star Answer with close to 7,000 awarded since the feature launched in late November 2018. Let’s keep this trend going, all!
    • The record for most Achievements sent in a single session is Session #406409 in which veteran tutor Bharathi Vavilakolanu sent 26 Achievements over 108 minutes!

Keep up the great work and happy tutoring!

— Team Yup