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How to Become a Certified ACT Tutor

The ACT is a standardized test that almost every high school student needs to take to get into the most prestigious colleges of the United States. The 2020 U.S. high school graduating class had almost 1.67 million ACT test-takers in total, with the national average composite score of 20.6. Since the score was one-tenth of a point lower than the national average score of 2019, it indicates a possible lack of the professional guidance that students are getting to ace the ACT. But there is always a way to turn things around.

As a teacher, you need to figure out how you can make learning more effective for your students. Now if you are one of the few people who have been to college, have a little teaching experience and a few entrepreneurial skills, rest assured that you have what it takes to become an ACT tutor and shape the future of your nation.

In addition to it, you must take note of certain things that help make you a trusted ACT tutor.

Top 6 Things You Need to Consider to Become a Successful ACT Tutor

• Gain As Much Knowledge As You Can About the ACT
  Before you can become a master, you need to be a student. It is important that you understand everything about the ACT. Only then can you earn the trust of your students and teach them with long-term impact.

A successful ACT tutor knows how to effectively utilize the study material because they have already scored high on their ACTs. If you fail to explain anything your students miss out on, it will only undermine their confidence in you. Moreover, anyone will want to verify your scores before hiring you as an ACT tutor.

Even if you have not taken the ACT, you can still become a certified ACT tutor. All you need to know is how to break down this standardized test into some easy and fun learning pieces that help your students to top it.

• Motivation Is the Key to Success for Your Students
  Motivating students will go a long way for you as well as them. Many students need constant reassurance and motivation to engage with a topic. Becoming a tutor is all about how you break complex pieces of information into simpler pieces and make learning an interesting task.

Take your time with each of your students, working with them accordingly to help them find their weak spots. One-on-one sessions help you connect better with your students and encourage them to believe in themselves to knock the ACTs out of the park.

• Get Your Hands on the Best Resources and Study Material
  Unreliable resources and study materials make it difficult to tutor effectively. When the practice questions have multiple errors and look nothing like those on the actual ACT, students may become frustrated, angry, and even disappointed. There is also a high chance that your students might score much lower than their desirable results.

Therefore, it is vital to organize your study material. Also, there are several articles and strategies available online for free. You should leverage such material and methods to help your students perform the best.

• Build a Supportive and Transformative Mentality
  Having a unique and adaptive teaching plan will help you become a successful ACT tutor. First things first, figure out when your students are going to take the test. This way you will have plenty of time to plan. To help them do well in the ACTs, you need to teach your students to take a systematic approach.

Create review strategies on specific topics and questions that your students are struggling with. Allow your students to be a part of the review process so that they can focus on their weaknesses and work on improving them. This way your students would know how to examine the ACT questions and get more quality study time.

ACT prep is easy but is almost impossible for your students to boost without constant practice. The bigger part of being a tutor is to support your students with enough practice questions so that they can prepare themselves well for the test.

• Turn Mistakes into Learning
  If you examine the ACT exams over the years, you will see that a certain set of questions are repeated over and over again. Your job as a tutor goes beyond helping them with finding “the right answer”. You need to work out the solution to questions that your students missed or could not solve.

It is your responsibility to work with the student to help them understand where they made a mistake and how they can avoid the same in the future.

• Get Multiple ACT Teaching Certifications
  Becoming a successful ACT tutor does not require you to have any formal certifications. However, there are leading organizations in the education and tutoring industry that have programs handcrafted for you that provide you with an ACT tutoring certificate.

If you decide to go the extra mile to become a certified tutoring expert, your experience in studying the standardized ACT may come in handy.

Some More Tips and Tricks to Help You With ACT Tutoring

• Be Organized
  Students follow you, either consciously or unconsciously. If you are not organized with your plans and strategies, students may see that as your lack of knowledge and lose their faith in you. Make sure that you are ready and have a plan for everything. It will also give you enough time to prepare your lessons ahead of time.
• Remember: The ACTs are Standardized Tests
  As an ACT tutor, your greatest power is the encyclopedic knowledge about the ACTs. The test includes the same types of questions from time to time. Once you know all the different types of topics, you can explain them efficiently to your students with any permutations.
• Determine a Price for ACT Tutoring Service
  Research and then decide how much you would want to charge. Whether you want to work as a freelancer or be a part of a tutoring agency. Many ACT tutors associate the price with the amount of time in business.

Conclusion
Whether you have an ACT certification or not, your purpose to become an ACT tutor should be to help students achieve their career goals. If you think about it, it’s funny how one test and some grades can deviate your students from the college of their dreams to an institution they didn’t want to study from.

Tutoring someone in a way that helps them achieve their life goals will be a gift that you give to them for a lifetime. For that, you need some serious tips and formulas up your sleeve and we have curated those in the aforementioned points.

If you have any other tips that work well for you, do let us know in the comments section below.