Overall Limit
45 minutes is the overall limit for session prep time. You may use this time across different preparation activities however makes sense for your session. For example, if you spend 30 minutes creating a slide deck and 30 minutes creating an assessment, you may track a maximum of 45 minutes, not 60. This is because it’s important for the majority of your community service hours to be spent directly helping learners in your sessions. We want to encourage tutors to focus more on actual tutoring and personalizing sessions to focus on learners' needs as opposed building lecture-style sessions. In addition, the session prep limit is also intended to help tutors build sustainable session prep practices & time management skills. If you find yourself spending more time than the guidelines suggest, please reach out to other tutors for advice on how to complete volunteer activities in a more time-efficient manner, see if other tutors potentially have materials or even pre-built curriculums they'd be willing to share with you.
Categories
When submitting volunteer hours for session prep in the Volunteer Hours Tracker, you must report the breakdown of your time across the various activities you did to prepare. Here are guidelines on these categories:
Reviewing and annotating practice tests you plan to cover in your session
Reviewing and annotating practice tests you plan to cover in your session
Learning material is not a volunteer activity, however, reviewing material that you are about to cover in a session can be tracked
Creating a slide deck
You must include a link/picture of your work
If you are tracking time for a co-hosted series, please include the names of all your co-hosts.
We generally encourage you to keep slides simple, and spend your time focusing on finding the right examples, visuals and problems to include in your slides
While you are welcome to do more to make your slides aesthetically pleasing, this cannot be tracked towards volunteer hours
Creating an assessment
Link to the assessment (this could be a Schoolhouse assessment, Kahoot!, or something else)
Editing previous session materials
Must include a link to the slides/quiz/etc.
Must include a list of major changes (which slides, what you added/removed, etc.)
Must include dates/session links you’ve previously tracked on the material (i.e. what session date did you use the non-edited material on?)
Series Prep
Must include a link to/picture of your planning.
Must include a link to your series.
Examples
Not detailed enough:
"Spent 20 minutes making slides for a Functions series on domain and range."
Detailed enough:
"Spent 25 minutes creating practice problems and examples on domain and range, which I added to a powerpoint for my Functions series. I spent 10 mins looking up problems online, 10 mins creating my own, and 5 mins adding them to my powerpoint."
"Reviewed the SAT practice test taken by the learners in the last session (5 mins), looked over the Khan Academy page on Reading/Writing questions that were common on the test to find correlations between the results and commonly missed questions (10 mins), and then created a PowerPoint summarizing the most common kinds of questions and how to approach them (15 mins)."
Key parts:
Full breakdown of process/activities
Time breakdown
Mention of specific resources used
Publicly accessible links provided to all resources mentioned [for the 2nd good example, the tutor would link (1) the practice test (2) the Khan Academy page (3) the powerpoint]
Be Reasonable
Don't put 30 minutes for creating an intro slide and two screenshots of some problems. Strive to be honest and as accurate as possible in your tracking.
If no learners show up to your session, you won't receive tutoring minutes, but you can submit up to 15 minutes of prep time — as long as you had learners registered. You may NOT track time for sessions with no learner signups