Wow I can’t believe how fast this year has flown by. We’re already in October. My daughter is on her fall break this week, and it made me thing about scheduling your clients during holidays. Some of my thoughts are below – if you have any you would like to add you can feel free to use the comments on our blog or facebook. We would LOVE to hear your ideas.
We are coming into that time of year when the holidays are just around the corner. Here are some tips for you to help make scheduling during those times less stressful.
1. Know when your students are going to be out of town or on vacation. When you sign your students up you’ll want to ask them about any time during the fall or spring (or summer) they’ll be going on vacation. You’ll want to make notes of this in their file and also note it on their individual schedule. It is important you do that as you get it. If you’re like me you’ll set it aside and forget to do it.
2. Get a school calendar from each of the schools you tutor with. Make note of dates when the school will be out of session. You’ll want to have a master calendar where you note all of these. If you tutor several different schools you’ll want to color code these dates.
3. Around the time of long breaks you’ll want to chat with the parents to find out exactly what their plans are. I usually try to do this the first week of September, November, December and March. This allows you to make sure they’ll be there (and you will be too).
4. Let the parents know well in advance when you’ll be taking time off (everyone needs time off… yes even you).
5. Â If you have tutor sessions that are going to be missed there are a number of different things you can do.
a) You can just miss them.
b) You can make them up on a weekend.
c) You can have a morning or afternoon class that can make up three or four hours of tutor time. Just let the parents know when you’ll be doing this. Let them know how their tutor hours will be used to pay for it. Explain to them as well this will be a group tutor session and you’ll be talking specifically about whatever you’ll be talking about.
Example – You have two weeks during Christmas when you don’t tutor. Instead you have a four hour morning tutoring session one week, and a 4 hour afternoon session the next. Tutor something all your students can learn from. If you’re teaching different subjects you can create a how to study session. You could also advertise this session at the local schools. You could charge for it or you could have it for free. If you use the free method you’ll need the parents to call you first and you’ll need to get some information from them. I’ve found this can be a wonderful way to get more students.
As always if you have any questions you can feel free to email us (you can just reply to this email if you subscribe to our newsletter), if you found this on our blog or facebook you can use the comments section.
We’ve completed the limited testing for our online tutor guide – you can now order it if you wish. We’ve made it available to you first. You can find details about it at the link below.
http://www.cleverapple.com/onlinetutoringguide2.html
Recent Postings
Ironically we’ve been talking the past week or so about tutoring with the iPad – you can check the first in the series here –
http://www.cleverapple.com/blog/how-to-tutor-with-the-ipad/