Frequently Asked Questions

Who comes to Direct Tutoring?

Among our present and past students are:

• A 6th grade student who was 2 years behind in math, and now receives A's and B's in his math class and enjoys solving algebra problems.
• Several first graders who are learning to read for the first time.
• A first grade student who was bored in school, and enjoys doing multiplication and story problems.
• Some four-year old students who wanted to learn to read, and love the lessons.
• Several middle school students who want to catch up with their reading--and are moving up fast!
• An older student with severe special needs who is learning to read for the first time in middle school.
• A professional who wants to improve her vocabulary and excel in her work environment.
• An adult who is learning Spanish for the first time, and now has a vocabulary of over 1,000 words.

We provide the tools to become a successful student regardless of current academic achievement!

What are Direct Instruction and Precision Teaching?

Direct Instruction:

The term "Direct Instruction" refers to a rigorously developed, scientific method for teaching that is fast-paced and provides constant interaction between students and the tutor.

Direct Instruction has been used to help inner-city children learn and excel. It is even more successful with children from middle and higher socioeconomic backgrounds. Thousands of studies paint the same story: Direct Instruction works, providing rapid gains, gains that persist, gains that increase self-esteem because children have real skills they can be proud of.

Precision Teaching:

There are many great explanations of the history of PT on the web. If you want more in depth information search for Precision Teaching on the web, but here's a quick description: A unique graphic tool, called The Standard Celeration Chart ™ is used to record student learning each session. The chart gives the student, tutor and parent immediate feedback on how the child is learning.

This chart shows the speed the student can perform a skill, as well as percent correct.

Precision teaching researched learned over 20 years ago that reading fluency is critical for comprehension and retention—because the chart showed clearly what happened if a student did not reach high levels of performance.

How do you teach reading at Direct Tutoring?

Reading has been taught over the past 20 years or so as though it was a natural process—like breathing or speech; i.e., give a student sufficiently engaging materials and he or she will become a reader.

The truth is that reading is as natural as learning to play the piano. There are many components, and they all must be learned to fluent, coordinated performance levels to make reading possible. We would not expect a beginning flautist to play a composition by Mozart, no matter how engaging the composition might be. There are scales to be learned, finger positions to be practiced, musical notes to be learned—and all must become effortless.

The components of reading instruction are quite clear from research done most recently by the National Reading Panel.

The National Reading Panel reached the conclusion that there are four critical components to reading instruction: Phonemic Awareness, Phonics, Fluency and Comprehension.

At Direct Tutoring we use instructional programs that builds each of these components to fluent performance levels. This allows the student to master each component and put them together to fluently read new and increasingly complex material.

Why did you call it Direct Tutoring?

We chose the name because it describes the fact that this is a reliable process, and because we use a proven instructional method called Direct Instruction.