Educators
What schools are eligible to receive support from Care for Students?
Care for Students currently is focused on providing support to public elementary, middle, and high schools with a particular emphasis on those that serve low-income communities or students of underrepresented backgrounds. If you work in a school that matches these apply to the Care for Students program below!
What is required of me as a teacher or facilitator?
The Care for Students program is designed make educators lives easier. We’ve built the experience to require a minimal time investment from teachers – once set up, most other engagements are completely optional.
We estimate an initial time investment of around 3 hours to meet with us, connect with the volunteers, decide on session times, and engage students and their families. Throughout the duration of the program, we estimate a weekly recurring time commitment of less than 30 minutes to send out reminders to students, upload class materials for the tutors, and optionally review the feedback on student learning provided by the volunteers. Lastly, we ask for a one-hour exit interview at the end of program to discuss feedback on ways to improve Care for Students.
How does it work?
The mission of Care for Students is to enable skilled volunteers from around the world to improve learning outcomes for the next generation of driven public-school students, particularly those of low-income and underrepresented backgrounds, through intimate and engaging virtual, small-group tutoring. Our strategy focuses on four main pillars.
Virtual Tutoring Sessions
These virtual, small-group tutoring sessions last one hour and recur weekly - each consists of two co-volunteers and 3-5 middle or high school students. Setting up these sessions for your students is made to be simple. The Care for Students organizers will meet with you to discuss the program and decide on which subjects, grade-levels, and time slots work best for you. Once these details are chosen, the organizers will connect you to your co-volunteers, and provide you with a tutoring session invitation to pass along to your students.
Care for Students tutoring is curriculum aligned. This means that what we teach in our tutoring sessions will directly support what you are teaching in class. We believe this is the best way to continue to challenge students that are excelling as well as come alongside students that are struggling. In order to help us accomplish this we ask educators to provide our volunteers with either worksheets, curriculum outlines, or homeworks that the students are currently working through. This gives them time to identify key concepts, prepare short lessons, and best answer student questions.
Feedback for Teachers
As a benefit of our tutoring being in lockstep with your in-class instruction, we are able to provide you with real-time feedback on students' understanding of course material. After each weekly tutoring session your volunteers write a short reflection where they take time to analyze their own performance teaching, as well as give observations on how students are doing with the material. This provides an additional datapoint for you to best decide how to allocate class time.
Measured Outcomes
We believe learning should be measured both quantitatively and qualitatively. To measure a students subjective learning experience, we provide a survey at the beginning and end of the program with questions vetted by you and specifically targeted to help students reflect on their levels of understanding. In addition, to the extent that the educators is comfortable with sharing, we also monitor our impact on student test performance.
Targeted Philanthropy
Using the Microsoft Corporate Volunteer Match we are able to send a donation for every hour a volunteer spends tutoring directly to the your school. With each sessions two co-volunteers, and two hours spent total spent tutoring, preparing and reflecting this amounts to a sizable grant by over the course of a year.
Have more questions?
All of our volunteers have 4-year degrees and are full-time employees at Microsoft. Additionally, the majority of volunteers have previous experience teaching or tutoring STEM in high school and college. Some of them even have masters and PhDs!
Yes, in addition to all of the volunteers having been background checked prior to their employment at Microsoft, all volunteers will also comply with the volunteer application and background check procedure laid out by the school.
This is something we’re still actively taking feedback on so please reach out with any questions or comments, but generally we think of identifying students in two ways – Do they have need? Do they have interest?
We think both types of students fit well in the program, but as an educator inviting them to the opportunity may take different strategies. For students that are “interested” and would actively seek out extra help it may be as easy as sending them an email with information on the program. For students that “need” the additional support a program like this provides but may not know how to seek it out themselves, the teacher may have to follow up with that student individually and possibly interface with their parents to make sure the student will commit to attending sessions each week.