She Owns It

Portraits of women entrepreneurs.

In my last post, Alexandra Mayzler pondered the best way to train the tutors she hires to work for her company, Thinking Caps Tutoring. She had devised a manual but feared she wasn’t presenting the information it contained in a compelling or memorable way.

At the last meeting of the group, Ms. Mayzler said reader comments prompted a breakthrough for her. “I’d kept thinking of staff as one entity and students as another, but at the end of the day we’re all students,” she said. Or, as two commenters, Jen from New York and Dan from Syracuse put it, “learners.”

Ms. Mayzler said she realized her training efforts were “just teaching.” With that insight, she considered the methods Thinking Caps uses to teach students. A Thinking Caps tutor would never expect a student to spend a 60-minute session reading from a textbook, she said. But that was how she trained her tutors. There was virtually no interactivity.

By contrast, during a student lesson, tutors give examples, show videos and “grab the computer and look at different Web sites,” she said. They break subjects up. For example, covering just one topic in chemistry, not the entire subject, in an hour.

When a business group member, Susan Parker, who owns the dress manufacturer BariJay, asked how many tutors are trained at once, Ms. Mayzler said that was another thing she was reconsidering. Initially, tutors were trained one-by-one. But as their numbers grew, they were trained in groups — without much forethought. “I realized, if you have four people, shouldn’t they be role-playing and asking each other questions?” said Ms. Mayzler. Going forward, she plans to harness the strength of the group, taking a more deliberate approach.

She has allocated half of November, December, and January to hammering out the specifics. “I decided it would make sense to use the exact model — we have a very specific way of structuring a lesson — in creating our training modules for the tutors,” Ms. Mayzler said. She also decided to get some help, and is working with a Thinking Caps employee, a former teacher, to draft an interactive training process, which she hopes to complete by January.

Ms. Mayzler asked a group member, Jessica Johnson, how her business, Johnson Security Bureau, communicates its protocols to its security guard employees. Ms. Johnson said that during orientation, new employees receive classroom training in company policies, and a written document. Later, they can access the policies on the company’s intranet site. For Ms. Mayzler, the mere use of the word “orientation” was a revelation. She was amazed by how much better it sounded than “polices and procedures,” the term she had been using.

In future posts, we’ll catch up with the other group members and check Ms. Mayzler’s progress.

You can follow Adriana Gardella on Twitter.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=1ea00cdb6ca89d9750d230893c1bea89