The purpose of the Peer Tutor Development program at KPU is to train, educate, and develop peer tutors to support success for KPU students. KPU's Peer Tutor program formalizes these elements within a framework of expected standards at three levels. With this education and support, peer tutors are able to interact with other students in ethically responsible ways and with academic integrity leading to professional levels of tutoring. Developed in 2014, this program was piloted and fully implemented in 2015. Our peer tutors are chosen from current KPU students who meet Academic and GPA criteria set by The Learning Centre (TLC) in consultation with discipline faculty.
Learning Centre peer tutors contribute to the work that is being done at the Faculty level to improve student performance and success, generate deeper student thinking and learning, and enhance classroom participation. Tutors at KPU work with one or, at most a few, students who are trying to learn course content materials more deeply and the peer tutor coaches them in this learning.
By the time peer tutors have completed Level Three, they will have completed 36 hours of direct instruction, 75 hours of tutoring experiences, and have created a personal tutoring portfolio of their development and accomplishments.
Objectives
When looking at this table of tutor training objectives you will notice that each of our three levels have six hours of initial education and training and then six more hours of development as tutees progress through the semester. The initial six hours is completed in person or in synchronous online sessions and the training is facilitated by a training team consisting of learning strategists and learning centre coordinators and assistants. We believe that all of our faculty and staff should assist with tutor training. After the initial training, follow-up is completed by the same training team as the initial training. Sometimes, since we are a multi-campus university, other members of the team may need to fill in for sessions with the tutors. Many tutors complete one level of training in one semester. If a tutor does not complete everything required for a level, he or she could progress to the next level’s training day, but the certification is not awarded until all outcomes have been assessed and met.
The objectives of the development process are:
KPU Tutor Training Objectives
Outcomes and Development
Learning to tutor takes time and experiences. In this Tutor Development Map we have matched the learning outcomes with the activities that support them as well as some guidance on how to assess whether those outcomes have been met. The assessment and supervision of the tutors is done by the training team members who work on the campus where the tutor consistently works. We can co-ordinate this work by meeting to review our progress to date. We have also recently developed a system of uploading and checking off training artifacts to Moodle, our learning management system. These artifacts are then preserved so that the tutor can use them later as he or she develops and polishes a portfolio. The overall outcomes of this program are:
KPU Tutor Development Outcomes Map
Academic References:
KPU Tutor Development references
This program has gone through the Canadian Educational Developers Caucus (EDC) of the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (STLHE) accreditation process. We are grateful for the feedback received and the opportunity for our tutor to achieve this accreditation on all three levels.
Our application:
KPU Application to EDC re:Tutor Development
All of these materials are available for use under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
Tutor Program Development Workshop
Fortunately, we have had the privilege of introducing many educators from across Canada to our tutor training program and ways of developing programs to meet individual insitutional needs. If you would like to take the progam yourself, or would like to send a member of your team to our Development Program, please check the link below. We look forward to meeting you.
We will offer the TPDW program online for fall 2022. For more information about this workshop, please click here.