Most classes are around 8-10 students, with us often breaking up into small groups of two and three for more individually focused instruction. The Teachers . All of the volunteer tutors are skilled users of computers, although they do have varying abilities on the different applications. For each section of the Introduction course, I have the tutors choose which medium they would like to introduce to the students. The volunteer tutors are given a 4-hour orientation prior to beginning with the students, during which we focus on the particular learning characteristics and needs of adult beginning readers and writers.
Students become teachers as soon as they know any skill.
We try to avoid students ever sitting around waiting for class to start. As soon as they arrive they sit down at a computer that is already booted up to a word processing program, even if they've never seen a computer before. The people who get there early thus become teachers for the students who arrive later. A student is often the first one to teach another student how to get a space between words, how to make a capital letter, where the period is, etc. These classes are taught at Literacy Partners main office in our multi-purpose conference rooms.