Sheila Akbar 0:00
Maybe they’re doing great following along in class. They feel like they understand things, but they’re not taking notes. Or they take notes, but they never look at them again, or they’re not doing practice problems. Hey folks, welcome back to the podcast. This week we get underneath why a grade might be slipping — and there are so many reasons. I think it’s really important to understand those reasons before you can figure out what needs to be done. A tutor might be able to help you figure that out, but let’s talk about what’s underneath that grade.

McKenzie Carver 0:44
All right, are you ready for the burning question this week?

Sheila Akbar 0:47
I’m ready, hit me.

McKenzie Carver 0:48
It is: my grades are slipping. Should I hire a tutor?

Sheila Akbar 0:53
If you can afford a tutor, yeah. But of course I have a lot to say. There are a lot of reasons grades could be slipping. Maybe the student doesn’t really understand what the teacher is looking for. Maybe the teacher hasn’t made it clear what they’re looking for. If the grade is dependent on a paper and the assignment sheet didn’t have a clear sense of what students would be graded on, it makes sense that a student might not know exactly what to be focused on. It may also be that the student procrastinated and didn’t really put as much effort into the assignment as they could have, or the test fell on a day they were having a migraine and weren’t able to focus and demonstrate what they really do know. Or maybe they don’t know how to study. That’s a really common one. Maybe they’re doing great following along in class, they feel like they understand things, but they’re not taking notes. Or they take notes but never look at them again. Or they’re not doing practice problems. So many options for what could be going wrong. We want to remember — grades are meant to be a measure of a student’s ability to grasp the subject matter. And there are a lot of different reasons they may not be grasping it or may not be able to demonstrate that they have grasped it. So the first thing I want to do is investigate what’s going on. If it was based on a paper, let’s look at that paper, look at the assignment sheet, look at the grading rubric, talk to the teacher. And what do you already know is going on that maybe you don’t want to admit to yourself?

Also — just because something worked for you last year doesn’t mean it’s going to work for you this year. We have a lot of students, especially in that transition from 10th grade to 11th grade, who are like, wait, why is school hard all of a sudden? Well, your classes just got a lot more advanced. Maybe you’re taking more advanced classes than before. Your workload multiplied. The expectations are just higher. Maybe you could get by without studying before, but this year is different. High school is a learning process. The goal is to get students ready for college-level work, so we expect things to get harder as they go along. This is the chance for a student to take stock and understand if there are new skills or habits they need to learn or implement.

The second thing I want to say is: I really want students to be thinking about what kind of help they need or what skills they need to learn before it shows up in their grades. We don’t need to be reactive to the grade. Our lives are not defined by our grades, though it may feel that way in high school. There are usually signals that something is not going well before the test or the paper is due, before the grade comes back, before the report card gets sent home. That might be things like spending so many hours on homework but feeling like it’s not done. Not sleeping enough — sacrificing sleep to make time for homework or studying. Or on the opposite end, students can get addicted to studying. They feel like they need to be studying all the time even when they’re doing great. They don’t trust themselves, they don’t trust their own preparation, so they just keep studying. That can be reinforced by competition in the classroom with their own friends — sometimes those are toxic competitive environments. So beyond solving the immediate problem, I also want to think about how we can be proactive and learn from this situation so it doesn’t happen again. Because once something shows up in your grades, you’re in recovery mode. I would much rather they’re ahead of it so it never shows up in their grades.

McKenzie Carver 6:21
Would you ever recommend almost like preventative tutoring? Say a student had a really hard time in math in 10th grade and calls you and says, should we get ahead of this in the summer leading up to 11th grade?

Sheila Akbar 6:39
The answer is yes. If this is something they tend to struggle with and you anticipate the next year’s class to be harder — yes, this is a great example of getting ahead of it. Preventative tutoring is a funny way to phrase it, but I guess that’s what we’re doing. We prefer to call it enrichment. I think that feels a little less like there’s some impending problem. It’s more like: let’s help you feel confident with this material, let’s clear up whatever was a challenge for you last year. Especially over the summer — students tend to forget things, get a little rusty, and then are expected to hit the ground running in the fall. Starting in August, a month before school starts, to just reorient yourself to what’s happening in this level of math, or read a book, write a paper — just reorient to those things and preview some of the material they’re going to see in the fall. That can really ease the transition.

But I want to say — it’s not always a tutor you have to hire. In some cases, a good study group or study buddy might be all you need. It depends on the kind of student and the study buddy. If you’re pretending to study but actually just playing video games or on TikTok, that’s not going to help anybody. But if it’s actually a person who maybe has similar struggles, or even different struggles where you can help each other — that’s a really nice complementary pairing. A study partner is about having someone help you stay accountable to what you know you need to do. You could review each other’s notes, because every student takes notes a little differently and you get a fuller picture of what was covered. You could quiz each other on concepts, or work through practice problems together. It’s a lot more fun with somebody else. And it’s easier to stay on track.

That’s one option that’s free. A lot of schools have peer tutors, which should also be free. There are also a lot of resources online — Khan Academy, or all the teachers who create content on YouTube. There are so many great AP review courses people have created on YouTube. Students can get another textbook or workbook to reinforce what they’re learning and give them additional practice. They can work with a parent or relative who has a strength in this field. And if that’s still not working, then maybe you think about paying for a tutor.

The benefit of a tutor is they know what they’re talking about. Everything else you’re kind of muddling through on your own, hoping you’re studying the right thing. A good tutor will be able to understand what’s going on in your class, what your teacher expects, where the student is coming up short, and design lessons and exercises to help close that gap. A tutor also doesn’t have the baggage a family member might. Nobody wants to work with their dad on whatever, feeling judged all the time. A tutor doesn’t have that baggage and may be able to motivate your student in a different way than a parent could. The idea is: get help. If you see yourself struggling, get help.

McKenzie Carver 11:34
When you said you want to investigate first — if you find out that the issue is really study habits or note-taking, is a tutor the best way to go?

Sheila Akbar 11:52
Usually no. We use pretty specific language at Signet. We have tutors who are academic subject support people. We also have executive function coaches. And sometimes our executive function coaches are also tutors — but what we’re brought in for will bring a different kind of perspective. An executive function coach — we also call them academic coaches — teaches skills that include executive functions but go beyond them. Executive functions are higher-order processes in the brain that help us get things done: creating a plan, working towards a deadline, getting started, following through, remembering to hand in the assignment, organizing things. Does it go in this folder? Where do these notes go? Did I bring the right books home to do my assignment? All of these organization, planning, and execution skills fall under the bigger umbrella of executive function skills. And they can be learned. Nobody is born with perfect executive functioning — people just learn those skills faster than others, through experience or watching someone else.

I know I learned a lot from watching my brother make mistakes. I watched him procrastinate. He was a very good student — he is the doctor in the family, the golden child — but I watched him procrastinate, misplace things. And I was like, I should not do that. If people have been listening to this podcast, they know I was very motivated by beating my brother. So I paid close attention to the things that seemed to be holding him back because maybe those were areas I could overtake him.

When I talk to a parent who is looking for executive function coaching for their child, and I can’t get them on the phone, or they forget to respond to an email, or they forgot to do the thing they said they were going to do, and they say “oh my god, it runs in the family” — yes and no. It’s not genetic, but they’re learning from you. So if you don’t have these skills, they’re not going to have them either. Sometimes it’s the parent that needs the coaching.

But to get back to your question: if you find that study skills and organizational skills are lacking, a tutor may not be the right fit. What they really need to learn are executive function and academic skills — how to write a paper, how to take good notes, how to study, how to know when to stop studying. Our tutors at Signet are cross-trained and always thinking about executive functioning skills and how to help the student become more self-sufficient and independent around their academics so they don’t need mom or dad to be the homework police. But when families hire some college kid to tutor their student in a subject, that person may know the subject really well but may not be thinking about how the kid is actually going to get this thing done. So a lot of the time when I’m tutoring a student, I give them a week plan: 15 minutes a day, you’re going to do this first, that second, this third, and then you’re going to text me a picture of this thing. I build in a lot of accountability and just spell it out.

There’s a classic exercise — I don’t know the official name, but there are probably a million YouTube videos about it — where you teach someone how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. You ask somebody, how do you make a PBJ? And they skip over things. Pretend I’m an alien and you need to explain this to me. They’ll say, oh, just get bread and peanut butter and spread it on there. But if you’re an alien, you’re like — what’s bread? You have to back up and say, well, you have to go to the store, and you have to have money, and you have to drive there. There are so many steps we take for granted in any process. The PBJ example is exaggerated to help make those invisible steps more visible. The same thing happens with studying. You need to know what to study for a particular test. You need to know where to find that material. Is it in your notes? In the textbook? In slides the teacher gave you? You have to know how to absorb the information — will just letting your eyes rest on the page help you remember force equals mass times acceleration, or do you need to do 15 practice problems where you apply that formula? Every kind of class has a different way of studying. And then you have to have your own personal gauge of yes, I know this topic — and you have to be really honest about it.

The process of studying is truly a process. When we can help students understand all the things they take for granted — like, you heard it once in lecture so you’re going to remember it — no, that’s not how you study. Not everybody is going to have the same process. It’s really important that especially as a student is just learning these skills, they have someone who can set up guardrails, remind them of other steps, help them when there’s a roadblock. But the goal is to teach them this skill so they can do it on their own going forward.

McKenzie Carver 19:00
Teach students, not subjects.

Sheila Akbar 19:03
Exactly. One of our core values.

McKenzie Carver 19:06
What if one of the issues after the investigation is that the student isn’t motivated?

Sheila Akbar 19:14
If the student doesn’t care, you’re not going to be able to force it. If they don’t care, it doesn’t matter how many ways you teach them to take notes — they’re not going to do it. This is where a lot of parents resort to: if you don’t do well in this class, you’ll never get into college and you’ll live in my basement for the rest of your life. That’s not helping anybody. Number one, it’s not true. Number two, it’s not motivating. It’s very disheartening. I understand — parents from my generation, this is what we heard from our parents. But bite your tongue, reflect for a moment. That’s not going to be the most helpful approach.

More helpful things include asking curious questions about what actually does motivate the student. Sometimes they can hate a subject but love the teacher, or love the subject but hate the teacher. There’s room for motivation in there.

I have a student who needs to prove people wrong. That is the surest way for him to lock in and get focused on something. Me, him, and his mom were talking about how can we get him a little angry and make him want to prove us wrong — because he said that’s the thing that motivates him more than anything. And I shared earlier that I was really motivated by beating my brother. I don’t know if my parents engineered that dynamic or not, but it worked in my favor for sure.

Sometimes it can be transactional — I’ll let you take the car for the night if you do this thing. But sometimes just being real with the student: hey, I get that you don’t like this or don’t feel successful — what would make you want to do this? At the end of the day, everybody wants to feel successful. Nobody wants to feel stupid. Sometimes it’s about identifying limiting beliefs — like “I’m just bad at math,” which is not the case. Even students with dyscalculia are not just bad at math.

I realize this line of answering can be frustrating to hear when somebody is Googling “my grades are slipping, do I need a tutor?” and they want a silver bullet right now. But it’s just like with medicine — you can’t just throw any antibiotic at a situation. You really need to understand what’s causing the problem and get the right antibiotic for that specific situation. It’s very similar with academics.

McKenzie Carver 22:51
You need to diagnose the problem before you can find a solution.

Sheila Akbar 22:55
Yeah.

McKenzie Carver 22:56
Do you have any stories about starting tutoring with a student and uncovering something greater going on?

Sheila Akbar 23:11
Many times. I think this is the story with a lot of our students who are doing test prep with an undiagnosed learning disability. They’re like, I’m just bad at testing. One student — one I always talk about — got everything right until she ran out of time. She had the skills and knowledge to do well on the test. She just didn’t have the time management. She thought she had ADHD. I’m not sure that’s what it is, I said — but of course I don’t have the training to diagnose somebody, so I said let’s get you an evaluation. They found a processing speed disorder that was really affecting her on the reading section. Reading is everywhere. When she felt so stressed out by reading because she just could not retain the information, it made the whole exercise a lot harder than it needed to be. We moved from teaching grammar rules and reviewing geometry to finding a strategy that works for her — a lot of different types of annotation so she didn’t have to hold information in her head, just find it when she needed it. We wouldn’t have known to focus on that without a clear diagnosis of what was really going on.

I had another student many years ago who was such a great student in session. We’d practice things, he’d get it. And then the next week it was almost like he didn’t even know who I was — like he’d forgotten everything. I tried everything. I made him send me pictures of his notes, we practiced things, he taught me things. And I’m like, this just does not stay in his head. So I talked to his mom, got an evaluation — working memory issues. And then because there are experts who have studied that, there are strategies to help people with those issues. He also got extra time and in his particular situation was able to take the test over multiple days — take a section, then study, then take another section.

McKenzie Carver 26:11
What I’m hearing overall is you have to diagnose the issue to find the problem.

Sheila Akbar 26:18
Yes.

McKenzie Carver 26:18
And if you don’t, and you just jump right into tutoring, that might uncover other problems too.

Sheila Akbar 26:25
Right. A good tutor will be able to help you do that diagnosis. I don’t want people to feel like they have to know exactly what’s going on before they engage a tutor. Actually, a good tutor will do that with you. And a good tutoring company will do that before you even meet the tutor. When people call and think they can just send me an email saying “I need a math tutor Tuesdays” — I’m like, no, no, we need to talk. And then we get off the call and they’re like, wow, I had no idea there were all these things to think about. And I’m like, yeah, that’s why I run a company. I don’t want to give you a solution that is not going to work for you.

Sometimes that conversation is so helpful in changing a parent’s attitude — my kid is just lazy, they’re not applying themselves, they’ve always struggled in math. Kids are going to absorb the stories that their parents tell about them. If we aren’t telling our students a story, they’re going to make up a story that is so much worse. So many kids with ADHD or another kind of neurodiversity internalize it as some sort of moral failing. They see all their peers being able to do the thing they struggle to do, and they’re like, I must be dumb, I’m not working hard enough, I’m a bad student. This is what they’re saying to themselves, and it’s so heartbreaking because of course it’s not true. When a parent has a story, it may be reinforcing or sending a kid further down this story path that is not helping them. I’m not saying lie to your kid and sugarcoat everything — but let’s find out what’s really going on. Because then we can do something about it.