Phases of Learning: Your tutoring experience may progress from assessment to mastery and beyond. 

• Assessment: The tutor identifies baseline skills, i.e., the student's current strengths and areas of need.

• ​Goals: The tutor and student or student's parents collaborate to set unique goals with mastery criteria.

• Mastery: Every session the student practices new skills, taking a step closer to mastering goals. The tutor records the student's progress. 

• Generalization: The tutor guides the student toward generalization, i.e., applying mastered skills in varied and novel contexts. Having learned the general principle behind a skill, the student creates and discovers ways to practice the mastered skill across diverse settings, people, instructions, and materials, in addition to producing varied and original responses. The purpose is for new skills to apply to the student's life in relevant ways.   

• Maintenance: The tutor checks maintenance, which is the persistence of skills over time. This is so important, considering that new skills build upon each other. The true test of learning is the independent demonstration of generalization and maintenance.

• Independence: At Inspire, the ultimate goal is the student's independence in applying new skills, not only in academic contexts but also throughout life. The tutor's job is to gradually work herself or himself out of a job, as the student becomes more and more independent!