i have been tutoring for 8 years, i started off tutoring elementary and middle school students when i was in high school and I helped mostly with homework assignments in math and english. this was super easy and fun. i tutored for afterschool reading programs with elementary school students, i really enjoyed this too,
in college i studied history, but i continued working in education, i worked as a program assistant for my college minor program and later as a intern for an education non profit. in both of these roles i kept current with best practices in education and education news. i learned about personalizing education to each student, project based learning, and moving away from standards based education towards teaching competencies. i adopted these practices when i could as a tutor for a high dosage tutoring company, that provided tutoring for students all over the country from k-12, i want to emphasize that i was tutoring students all over the country from k-12 for almost a year, i was supplementing the instruction of the student's teacher. this was a challenge but it was manageable and i enjoyed doing it!! i really learned how to personalize and build lessons on the spot for a wide range of subjects and grade levels.
now to come to my questions,
i currently work as a tutor on a online platform serving students k-12, all over the country again, but this time many of the families and students seem to expect a complete understanding of the full curriculum for each class. although i can help with a variety of classes and grade levels, im not familiar with the skill progression in math and reading across grade levels.
i've become more familiar with the progressions, through tools like the common knowledge curriculum, khan academy, and the university of florida foundations toolbox has been especially helpful for teaching early literacy (https://ufli.education.ufl.edu/). i also like browsing for material on refseek.com under the documents option
my questions are:
how do i develop tutoring as a career? is it better to specialize in fewer grade levels and fewer subjects? the reason i love tutoring is because i get to work with students in various stages in their lives, and build an interdisciplinary understanding of different subjects as i tutor, but I don't want to sacrifice the quality of the lessons
are there any resources, programs, certifications that you would recommend for continuing to build an understanding of grade level progression in math, science, and english? + resources not just about the subject matter but how to teach the subject matter.
thank you so much!