Large tutoring programs often find it challenging to scale operations while maintaining high quality tutoring. Complex scheduling, ongoing hiring and training, and tight budgets make it hard to keep an eye on individual sessions and student satisfaction in those sessions.

The William & Mary TutorZone has found that a strong tutor community is a key driver of session quality. This element can sometimes be neglected amongst learning centers, but is a nice way to lay a foundation you can trust. Great tutor community leads to happier tutors who are more excited about their job and who support each other in the day-to-day of tutoring. It also reduces turnover, and makes hiring easier through increased referrals.

Colleen Rogers and her team at the TutorZone (140 tutors) managed to grow student usage by 18% in AY24 vs. AY23. Colleen feels the way that this success was driven by improvements in three key frontiers:

1. An efficient lead tutor structure with “chairs” for program management
2. Community-building amongst tutors through a number of tested and well-documented events
3. Software simplification that has saved hundreds of staff hours

This article explores William & Mary's story, detailing both the operational shift that saved them hundreds of hours and the programmatic choices that have fostered a connected, effective tutoring team.

Managing at Scale: The Lead Tutor Model

To manage its 140-person staff, William & Mary developed a lead tutor model (you can also reference Sarah’s lead tutor model at UGA). This management layer makes the large program feel connected and provides leadership experience for the students involved.

Overview of the Lead Tutor model

1. Structure: The program has six Lead Tutors, each supervising a team of 20-25 tutors. This ratio is intentional; a prior model with 35-40 tutors per lead proved unmanageable for the student leaders. Core duties for leads include running team meetings, conducting 1:1 check-ins, and sending administrative reminders for tasks like timesheets.

2. "Chair" Model: Each Lead Tutor holds a "chair" position, giving them ownership over a specific programmatic domain. This distributes responsibility and allows leads to focus on areas that interest them. Colleen took this model right out of the greek life playbook, to great success. The six roles are:

• Upkeep and Supply Chair: Manages the physical space and essential materials.
• Social Chair: Plans and executes all community-building events.
• Professional Development Chair: Partners with the career center to help tutors articulate their job skills.
• Tutor Appreciation Chair: Boosts morale by sharing positive student feedback and coordinating small gifts.
• Time Management Chair: Trains and leads the tutors who deliver the center's time management consultation service.
• Data Chair: Analyzes program data to find trends and inform staff decisions.

3. Intentional Hiring: The center hires for these positions specifically. When a vacancy opens, the interview questions are tailored to the skills needed for that chair role, ensuring a good fit for both the student and the program.

Involving tutors this deeply in program management provides a real sense of ownership, which contributes to an invested tutorbase. But beyond using lead tutors, TutorZone has a whole host of other activities designed specifically to build culture within the tutorbase.

Fostering the Tutor Culture Through Events

With operations running smoothly, the William & Mary team invests its time in the human side of the program. They believe that a connected tutor community directly translates to a better, more cohesive service for students. To build these connections, the TutorZone’s Social Chair plans a variety of events based on tutor feedback and observation.

1. Monthly Tutor Picnics

• The Idea: A survey revealed tutors' number one desired activity was to simply eat lunch together.
• The Playbook: The center hosts monthly "bring your own lunch" (BYOL) picnics, eliminating catering costs. The location is a conference room near a main dining hall for convenience. Each event begins with a quick icebreaker (name, year, subjects tutored) before conversation flows organically. The picnics consistently draw 10-15 tutors.

2. Tutor Game Nights

• The Idea: Staff overheard tutors discussing board games and created an event around that shared interest.
• The Playbook: Hosted once or twice a semester, tutors and staff bring their own board games to the center. The informal structure allows small groups to form and play. The first event successfully brought together a group of computer science tutors who might not otherwise interact.

3. The Annual Tutor Formal & Graduation

• The Idea: This capstone event combines a "formal" to celebrate the end of the semester with a "graduation" to honor departing seniors.
• The Playbook: On a small budget (~$300 for pizza), the team reserves a campus space. The graduation portion includes a presentation of each senior, their future plans, and the presentation of a special honorary cord. It is their most well-attended event, drawing 30-50 tutors and guests.

The Value of Experimentation

A key part of their success is the willingness to try things and accept that not everything will work. A friendship bracelet-making day and an attempt to form an intramural team did not gain traction and were simply discontinued—viewed not as failures, but as data points on what their tutors want.

Streamlining Operations with New Software

William & Mary’s previous scheduling tool had recurring glitches, such as sending reminders in the wrong time zone and frequently locking students out. This was especially problematic for students with accommodations, with Assistant Director Colleen Rogers noting, "after one bad experience, you’d lose them forever.”

The manual workload for staff was unsustainable, totaling over 100 hours per semester:

• No In-App Messaging (30 hours/semester): All cancellations required staff to manually mediate between students and tutors. "At one point, it seemed like my entire job was managing the TutorZone inbox," Colleen recalls.
• Manual Course Setup (70 hours/semester): Each of the program's 280 courses had to be built individually, taking 15-20 minutes per course.
• Difficult Reporting (10 hours/semester): Staff spent hours each month cleaning messy spreadsheets just to calculate basic usage numbers.

Colleen had a strong understanding of these numbers and had quantified the total hours the issues were wasting. This armed TutorZone with a good argument to justify investment in a new software platform.

TutorZone switched to Penji in Fall 2024. Reliable single sign-on and an easy to use mobile app fixed the student access problems. The administrative workload was dramatically reduced by in-app chat, in-app cancellation, and a "Report a Problem" button that goes to Penji support first. TutorZone is doing almost zero session support versus 2+ hours per week historically.

TutorZone has observed a few other key advantages after investing in a quality tutor scheduling system. Staff could now get instant answers to data questions from quick access dashboards, instead of relying on merging multiple spreadsheets and running reports there. They could also easily monitor tutor capacity to see which subjects had high demand versus excess availability. This allowed the team to refocus the hundreds of hours saved for staff into program development and changes to better serve students.

The operational improvements contributed to an 18% increase in appointments (from ~7,000 to 8,300) and a 13.5% increase in total hours tutored year-over-year.

Preparing for the Future: The Human Value in an AI World

Like all learning centers, the TutorZone is thinking about its role as student usage of AI grows. Their strategy is to focus on what makes human tutoring different. Colleen plans to focus tutor training on two key areas:

• The Power of Encouragement: Training tutors to provide genuine encouragement and build student confidence in a way an AI cannot.
• The Value of Continuity: Emphasizing a human tutor's ability to recall past sessions and recognize a student's growth over time, building a rapport that AI cannot replicate.

For William & Mary, the approach is straightforward. By using technology to create a stable operational base and investing in the human elements of their program, they are building a durable, effective learning center. Their story serves as a practical example for any program looking to operate better at scale and demonstrate its value on campus.