The better you know your student, the more effective you will be in planning lessons.  This is why you are encouraged to spend your first session getting to know one another and establishing a good rapport. 

• Interview your student to learn more about his or her personal history and future goals. 

• Listen to your student – you can pick up a lot of clues just from paying attention to how he or she interacts with you, word choices, and communication struggles. 

• Look at the level descriptors for your student (located on your student’s progress report) and utilize

  • Connecticut’s Achievement Level Descriptions for the Smarter Balanced Assessment .  

  • Performance Level Descriptors (PLD) for Grades K-2 Mathematics

This information will help you to identify specific skills your student still needs to develop.

To learn more about your student, try mapping or charting your student’s daily activities to see where their skills are already sufficient and where they need more work.  Model the activity by drawing your house or apartment on a sheet of paper, then drawing all the places you go to in a typical day.  Discuss what you do at those places.  You then ask your student to do the same.  Discuss the chart with your student and talk about the ways your student uses reading, writing, math or science (or whatever the topic is you’re tutoring) in each of those situations.  Role mapping can give you a window into your student’s life. Once you understand your student better, you can plan lessons based on these topics (i.e. going to the doctor, riding the bus, etc.). This will help you to limit the content and focus your lessons, ensuring they are relevant to the student's daily life.

Students with low level skills may be less capable of explaining what they need to learn.  In these situations you’ll be able to rely on the student’s assessment results and interview to develop appropriate lessons.  One strategy for involving your student in setting goals is to have him or her select topics to focus on.  You can use a picture dictionary to identify topics you’re your student, having him or her put sticky notes on those pages that are most important to him/her.  Higher level students can generate a list of topics and then prioritize them. It can sometimes be more effective to "force" students to make a choice between a list of goals (either that they generated or that you suggested) as a way to determine what their priorities are.