High School Tutoring: 3 Tips That Work for Teens

My daughter Alexandrine was diagnosed with dyslexia in high school. She’ll tell you that she despised tutoring. Here’s what we’ve both learned about high school tutoring, including what to look for in a tutor and how to pay for it when the budget is tight.

She Despised High School Tutoring

She started in eleventh grade. And the first person she worked with (in her words) treated her like she was a baby. She was sixteen taking AP classes, and her impression of the high school tutoring sessions was being treated like a six-year-old. So Alex shut down.

Now that I’m on the other side, and I understand completely. There is an enormous difference for high school tutoring and elementary tutoring.

How Does Orton Gillingham Work?

Before we talk about age, let’s clear up something that confuses almost every parent I meet.

Orton-Gillingham, usually shortened to OG, is not a curriculum. It’s an approach. It’s a way of conveying information to students of any age. Curricula like Wilson and Barton are built on it, but OG itself is the method underneath.

Three words describe it. Explicit, systematic, and adaptable. We’ll leave the multisensory for later as high school tutoring needs to treat this part carefully. Explicit means nothing is left for the student to figure out alone. Systematic means you’re building a foundation, one brick placed carefully on the last. Adaptable means it bends to fit the student in front of you.

Why does that matter? Because for decades we haven’t taught reading explicitly in this country (some schools still don’t). They teach generalities and assume students will absorb the rest. Roughly sixty percent of students might not get everything they need, and their knowledge ends up looking like Swiss cheese.

A real OG session does more than patch holes. It weaves together reading (decoding), with spelling (encoding) with the history of English (Anglo-Saxon, Latin, and Greek morphemes), and writing. It’s really a set of micro-sessions.

Alexandrine points out why that structure matters for a frustrated teen. When a subject already feels miserable, your attention span for it shrinks. Short segments beat forty-five minutes of one painful passage. Every time.

High School Tutoring Requires A Different Approach

Right now I’m tutoring a rising third grader, and a rising twelfth grader. The way I work with each of them barely resembles the other.

With the younger student, I follow the structure very closely. Ten segments, the letter and sound decks, the green spelling cards, straight through, all in sequence.

If I were to pull out those cards with my twelfth grader? Eye roll, then shutdown. So I have to deliver every piece of that same information through a different door.

Spelling becomes the diagnostic tool. With high school tutoring, the knowledge is Swiss cheese, so I have to find the holes without insulting anyone. I worked with a ninth grader on final stable syllables, the consonant + L E syllable pattern ([ble, [ple, [zle). I started with a quick 15-word spelling list with that pattern; watched her spell, and immediately discovered she didn’t know the syllable type. So I taught it. In another session I checked whether she knew to double a middle consonant. She did, even though she’d never heard it named. Five minutes of conversation instead of five sessions.
Questions replace lessons. Instead of teaching what a syllable is, I ask. “Let’s talk about syllables. What are they?” I still confirm they know both vowel sounds. I just get there through conversation.
Writing carries the rest. Sentence structure, word structure, the language pieces. It all fits into writing in a way that respects their age.
Their interests choose the material. With my students I ask what they’re actually into, then build the reading around it. Alexandrine says it best. when reading statistics or fashion, she’s picking fashion every time. If she’s going to work hard at reading, she might as well work hard at something she loves.
The encouragement changes too. With a young student I’m openly enthusiastic. With a teenager, that same energy reads as “fake” and they’ll see straight through it.

Basically, what sits underneath all of it is respect. A twelfth grader has accomplished a great deal to get where they are. It’s important to acknowledge that.

3Cs For Finding The Right Tutor

When parents ask me about high school tutoring and how to choose the right tutor, I give them three things to check.

Certification. Not all OG tutors are equal. Someone who took a week of training is not the same as someone who took that week, recorded five video sessions with real students, and logged over a hundred tutoring hours. That’s the practitioner level. At the therapist level it’s ten video segments and over seven hundred hours. I’m an ALTA certified Therapist, so I’m biased!
Connection. Ask directly whether the tutor works with older students. They don’t need to be your child’s best friend, but there has to be mutual respect. If there isn’t a connection, stop after three sessions instead of six months.
Communication. A good tutor talks with you regularly about progress and expectations. Introducing a concept is not the same as mastering it, and mastery can take far longer than three months. Your child needs that honesty too. Some days are a slog. That’s part of the process, not a sign of failure.

What If High School Tutoring Feels Out Of Reach?

Dyslexia has been called a rich person’s diagnosis, and I hate how true that can feel. Evaluations, IEP meetings, 504 plans, advocates, sometimes a lawyer and then tutoring on top of it.

Being able to read, write, and spell is a fundamental liberty. It shouldn’t depend on your income. So here are four real paths to help:

Tutor your child yourself. Explicit, OG-based programs exist for parents who aren’t teachers. UFLI, from the University of Florida, is very affordable and most of it downloads right from their site.
Homeschool with a structured literacy curriculum, so your child moves at their own speed instead of the speed set by twenty-five other students.
Find a practitioner in training. People earning certification need student hours, and many tutor free or at a deeply reduced rate. Look in the Orton-Gillingham Teachers Facebook Group and/or parent dyslexia support groups, and post that you’re looking for someone who needs practicum hours. some will offer free or reduced-rate tutoring
Use your state’s ESA funds. Education Savings Accounts give families money to direct toward their child’s education. OG tutoring can qualify. Find out whether your state has a program, whether your child qualifies, then find an approved vendor who can accept the funds. Enrollment usually opens in the spring, so watch those deadlines. You can see the states where I’m an approved vendor at theliteracykeys.com/esa-tutoring.

Summary

There’s a lot here which can feel overwhelming. Alexandrine compares it to figuring out how to file your taxes the first time. Nobody teaches you. You just have to start.

So start. Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither is a reader. Progress happens over time, and you will be amazed at how much of an expert you’ll become along the way.

If you’d like a hand figuring out your next step, I offer a free consultation on my contact page or click on the button below:

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