This real-life story is a translation of a text first published in Eductive’s French edition.
For our English Help Center, we have developed a series of fun activities to support the work of tutors during their meetings with their tutees. We wish to share our activity kit and introduce you to our approach.
Through the Canada-Quebec Agreement on Minority-Language Education and Second-Language Instruction, we obtained a grant from the Ministère de l’Enseignement supérieur to develop this digital toolkit.
In this Real-Life Story published in April 2022, we present the toolkit used to tutor students enrolled in the 1st English as a Second Language course. After the text was published, in the summer of 2022, we completed a kit for the 2nd course. The 2 kits are now combined in the Cool-Aid Center Tutoring Tool Kit.
In February 2022, we presented our tool kit during the Semaine de la FAD 2022 [2022 Distance Learning week] hosted by FADIO [in French]. You can watch the recording.
Recording of our presentation during the 2022 Distance Learning week [in French]
At the ESL Help Center of the Cégep de Rimouski (the “Cool-Aid Center”), more advanced students (the tutors) are paired with students having some difficulties (the tutees). The tutors are volunteers. Although they receive basic training in helping relationships, until recently, they lacked guidance and confidence in their own ability to help their tutees.
We wanted to better support our tutors, so that they in turn can better support their tutees.
In short, we wanted to:
We wanted the solution we developed to be accessible and flexible.
Indeed, each tutee has specific needs (some have a disability, some are recent immigrants, some have children, etc.). Each tutor, in collaboration with the tutee, can choose what is best for the tutee.
In addition, the pandemic highlighted the need for flexibility. We wanted to develop resources that were useful both remotely and in person.
Finally, we wanted to develop materials that would be sustainable. The help center is not always run by the same people. We wanted materials to be easy to use for anyone, without requiring a steep learning curve.
We wanted to ensure that the framework of activities offered to tutors was rigorous. However, tutors are not teachers, and the help center is not a classroom. We didn’t want to just put together a bank of “traditional” grammar exercises; we wanted to change the paradigm.
We wanted to offer fun and friendly activities to tutors and tutees. The idea is to promote the joy of learning. Our motto for the Cool-Aid Center is “The grammar is implicit, but the fun is real.” We focus on conversation, interaction and play.
Our toolkit contains activities related to the subject matter of the 1st mandatory college English course.
We built our toolkit in Google Slides, an easy-to-use tool. We also integrated activities created with:
When you open the toolkit, you have access to a series of digital books. One of them presents our model (Model, Apply, Perfect).
Screenshot of the first page of the toolkit, with the different digital books it contains.
The other 16 books are all divided into sections in the same way:
Screenshot of the cover of one of the digital books in the toolkit (for learning the use of future tense verbs). You can see the different tabs that separate the sections of the book.
To play the game we titled “What a Trip!” the tutor and tutee must choose a piece to play with and take turns rolling the virtual die to advance. (The game can also be played with more than two).
Upon arriving at a square, the player clicks the 🛈 icon to read the description of an incident that occurred during their trip. They must then pass this information to the other player by retelling it in the past tense, in a complete sentence.
On some squares, the player must draw a “Challenge” card. If they succeed in the challenge associated with the card, they can play again. If they fail, they must skip the next round.
The “What a Trip!” game
The tutor and tutee take turns spinning the study habits wheel and asking each other questions about the topic determined by the wheel. This is a pretext for discussion: they can talk about the advantages and disadvantages of their habits, etc.
The study habits wheel
Questions targeting possessive pronouns are embedded in a video from a manga. The tutor must read the questions to the tutee, who must answer orally using as many pronouns as possible.
Yu-Gi-Oh! Poker Night
At the Help Center, students do more than just the activities in the toolkit. Depending on their needs, they may prepare oral presentations or work on their homework. The 64 activities in the toolkit are therefore more than enough to fill a session. Moreover, the tutor who wishes to do so can push further by deepening the conversations initiated within each activity.
Our toolkit meets our needs perfectly.
It is user-friendly and easy to use. It is very straightforward to train teachers and tutors to make it their own.
The toolkit can be used on any electronic device (computer, tablet, phone), in person or remotely. All content is in one place. The toolkit is easy to share electronically (just share the link!) and content can be downloaded as a PDF or printed.
With these activities, tutors feel supported. We conducted a survey among them:
We are very satisfied: our activities are adapted to the pace of the tutees. They encourage interaction in a fun and friendly way.
We have received a new grant to produce explanatory videos for tutors and, more importantly, to develop a 2nd kit for the 2nd mandatory English course. We will of course share these resources with the college network!
The 2nd toolkit is not ready! The 2 kits are combined in the Cool-Aid Center Tutoring Tool Kit.
