Tutoring has become a familiar tool that schools use to reinforce classroom teaching and improve student achievement. That's especially been the case because of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and its provisions for supplemental education. No matter what the future holds for NCLB, principals and other educators will still need to know what kinds of tutoring are effective and for what purposes. Principals and other educators will benefit from learning more about promising tutoring practices drawn from the best available studies and field research (Gordon et al. 2007). What follows are practical recommendations that educators can apply immediately to improve school tutoring programs. #1. USE A DIAGNOSTIC/DEVELOPMENTAL TUTORING PROGRAM. Evidence indicates that when individual diagnosis is structured into a tutoring program, long-term student achievement increases. One effective way of accomplishing this is by having the tutor observe and record student learning skills on a session-by-session basis. This aids in a more accurate diagnosis of specific learning disabilities (Vellutino et al. 1996). Accurate observation can guide the tutor in selecting short diagnostic tests and exercises to better detail individual learning obstacles. Using a diagnostic/developmental approach will help the tutor discover underlying, perhaps subtle student cognitive processing issues, such as learning disabilities (i.e., dyslexia, visual/auditory perceptual issues, attention-span limitations, etc.) (Gordon et al. 2004). #2. STRUCTURE THE TUTORING PROGRAMS. Design and implement a highly structured tutoring program for your school. This will help tutors implement more precise individualized tutoring, rather than generic homework helper or drill-and-practice tutoring that provides little, if any, assistance in improving student classroom achievement (Cohen, Kulik, and Kulik 1982; Ellison 1976; Rosenshine and Furst 1969; Wasik and Slavin 1993). One example of such a structured program used researched, field-based curriculum scripts to build skill competencies at an introductory, maintenance, or mastery learning level. The Individualized Instructional Program (IIP) systematically designed into its curricula more than 300 learning descriptors to document academic skill achievement, specific learning-how-to-learn skills, and personal motivational outcomes. These curriculum scripts used a test-tutor-test approach by tracking tutor observations session to session and using shorter diagnostic/developmental measurement tools rather than lengthy diagnostic tests. Since many academically challenged students tend to exhibit test-phobic behaviors, the results of this approach appear to be more accurate. (See Figure 1.) Such an approach also has the advantage of increasing tutorial instructional time and reducing the time spent on testing. In these structured programs, tutors assessed students using learning descriptors in one of 52 subject areas. (See Figure 2.) On a one-to-one basis, the typical tutoring program included 25 one-hour sessions conducted over about 13 weeks. Or on a one-to-five basis, tutors conducted 40 hours of instruction in two-hour sessions over about 10 weeks. The curriculum-script method allows the tutor to follow a more thoughtful, sequentially arranged, systematic tutoring program based on a written record, rather than on informal guesswork. This helps minimize the risk that an individual tutor will overlook significant student learning issues. Also, diagnosis becomes an ongoing process throughout the tutoring session, rather than only during a pretesting phase (Gordon, Morgan, and Ponticell 1995; Gordon 1983; Morgan, Ponticell, and Gordon 1998). #3. USE YOUR MOST EXPERIENCED TEACHERS AS TUTORS AND TRAIN THEM. Highly trained tutors have consistently produced better tutoring results. In general, tutors are effective because they give students more personalized attention. …