Knowing a second language is truly a super power! Beyond the practical benefits it brings, such as expanded career prospects and a competitive edge, it also paves the way to a deeper well of life experiences. Through language acquisition, we not only gain access to new opportunities but also embark on a journey of self-discovery, deepening our understanding of ourselves through diverse cultural encounters.
This is why we are so passionate about helping our students succeed in French and this is what led our director, John to developing one of our proprietary and unique tutoring processes called The LEAP System! It’s one of the aspects that’s sets our team apart from the rest, read further to hear about it directly from John himself.
John here! I’d like to tell you the origin story of the LEAP system which stands for: The Learning Excellence Achievement Plan. I’m super proud of this system because it works to make everything clearer and easier for our parents, students and teachers.
I have been tutoring students for over 16 years now and the basic ideas of LEAP grew out of this experience. Firstly, I strongly believe in giving students chances to make choices and to direct their own lives, especially when it comes to their learning. This is important to me because they’ll engage so much better and I want to foster a strength in them, helping them to take charge of their lives. At first, this looked like a short monthly check-in I did with each of my students to see which skill (like reading, writing, speaking, etc) they wanted to focus on for the coming month. Secondly, from working with so many parents, I learned just how hard it was to grasp how your child is doing: Are they learning? What are they learning? How fast are they growing? Help!
The next piece of the puzzle was formalizing this into a structured process as we hired more teachers onto our team besides Mary and myself. This allowed me to figure out a student’s skills in conversation, reading, writing, and the other things behind the scenes of how a student’s mind works. Now, the hard skills are definitely an important part of figuring out what a student needs, but I found that a key piece is getting an idea of who the student is as a person – the right student with the right teacher working together creates a formula for success! On top of all of that, parents get a chance to chat with me (I do the assessments personally) in real time and tell me all the tidbits of information, then clear up any lingering questions. Getting both the student’s personal goals and the parents goals gives me a solid starting point for where to go and I also send parents an outline of the program we would use when teaching.
Funny thing is that the questions don’t stop just because lessons are under way and that’s great! While parents have access to the notes that our teachers take for every single lesson, that can be a lot of reading. I’m not sure about everyone else, but I’d rather be reading for my book club. So I thought to myself “Surely there is a bite-sized way to know how the lessons are going…” and yes there is! The key is the goals that we set up during the assessment or that I personally setup with you at the start of the school year (I have a quick 7-minute phone call with parents in September to set us up for each new school year) – every two months, we email the families with a 3-part summary of that past two months: summary of progress towards goals, plan for the next two months, and any recommendations for extra things that could help the student grow outside of lessons. This is also the perfect time to touch base with the teacher, with me, or to provide some feedback. This way we can keep on track and also see how we’re doing, feeling reassured that the students are growing strong.
And that’s really what this is all about: always striving to find the best ways to support our unique students on their learning journey.. Each of us will continue growing our whole lives and it’s a gradual process – even our own Les Petites Pommes tree has taken years to grow its broad branches so that it can support more and more students. Each and every one of our students are precious treasures, so the point of LEAP is to see them all as individuals. We use it so that our students can begin making the leaps and bounds that we know that they’re capable of achieving.
