LINC's Teen Tutor Program

LINC’s Teen Tutor Reading Partner Program provides another way to more effectively carry out our mission. Through this program, middle school and high school students tutor elementary school students one-on-one in reading at least once a week in schools and afterschool programs in many of the city’s low-income areas. The program seeks to improve the academic skills and self-esteem of all participating students. Over the past six years, the Teen Tutor Reading Partner Program has grown from 87 tutors and 112 students in two boroughs to 853 teens reading with 1093 young children in 48 programs in Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Staten Island, and Hudson, New York. Last year alone, the program provided 9,957 additional reading hours to its participants. In October of 2004, the Teen Tutor Reading Partner Program was awarded a Youth in Action Award from the New York Life Foundation for its work in Brooklyn.

LINC launched its Teen Tutor Reading Partner Program in 1998 to give New York City’s at-risk children and youth a chance at a better future. The program works two ways:

1. it serves as a youth leadership program for teenaged tutors, who gain not only reading skills but also increased self esteem, a sense of pride in ability, and improved school attitudes and attendance; and


2. it improves the reading ability of elementary school children through tutoring with more experienced readers, and connects children with strong teenaged role models who value literacy and learning.

At each Teen Tutor site, LINC Program Directors hold three on-site training workshops for the tutors. These sessions use games, storytelling, dramatizations and demonstrations of read-aloud skills to provide student tutors with successful methods to develop their students’ reading skills as well as their own enjoyment of reading. The workshops also give teen tutors techniques for developing good rapport with their students, such as using praise instead of criticism to motivate. Tutors explore their own creative resources to plan learning activities, carry them out, and reflect on their effectiveness. The programs are supervised on a week-to-week basis by school staff and LINC Program Directors. Tutors keep journals to document their experiences as tutors, share their thoughts on the program, and track and describe their tutees’ progress. At the conclusion of the program year, tutors and school supervisors evaluate the program. These evaluations form the basis of ongoing LINC planning and strategy for program improvement.

• To improve the basic reading skills of both the teen tutors and their students
  
  
• To encourage the enjoyment of reading, as well as learning in general
  
  
• To increase the self-image and confidence of both groups of students
  
  
• To give students rewarding experiences in community service
  
  
• To reduce the drop-out rate of at risk and under prepared high school students
  
  
• To encourage responsibility and provide real work experiences for teenagers
  
  
• To provide elementary students with role models to counteract images of dropouts and failures
  
  
• To break down stereotypes and reduce prejudices in children and teenagers of different racial, ethnic and religious groups by creating a working and friendly relationship amongst children who would not otherwise interact
  
  
• To raise the awareness among teens about the importance of literacy, so that they will conscientiously promote it among their younger siblings and with their own children in the future