Mt. San Antonio College

Program overview

Mt. San Antonio Community College has long recognized and used both tutoring and supplemental instruction to support its students’ learning. Individual tutoring provides a student with clear structure and a technique for how to approach challenging material, while stimulating the learning process. A good tutor can help a student to develop the self awareness (meta-cognitive skills) needed to succeed in applying learning strategies independently. Similarly, supplemental instruction (or SI) is a peer-facilitated academic support program that attempts to improve student performance and retention by offering regularly scheduled, out-of-class review sessions. In early 2009, the Writing Center tried to combine the best elements of both with some specific writing support – and the Tutors in the Classroom concept was born!

The Tutors in the Classroom program is designed to support students’ writing in three ways:

1. A tutor is placed with an instructor in one section of composition and will be in the classroom for several hours a week to assist the instructor and to become familiar with the class work and assignments.
2. Tutors will lead group writing sessions outside of class time to facilitate understanding of class assignments for students. Group writing sessions are held in one of the computer classrooms located in the Writing Center.
3. Students can make individual tutoring appointments with their TIC during specified hours in the Writing Center. 

Spring 2011 tics and faculty

Summer 2009 results of the tic program

The summer 2009 semester brought exciting results in the TIC program! On average, 98% of students who participated in the TIC program passed English 67. Their non-participating counterparts had an average of a 77% pass rate.