Solutions · By outcome
Teach better
These are the problems that get in the way of learning itself: explaining, engaging, checking understanding and following up. Here’s every one we’ve mapped, by who feels it, and how Pencil Spaces solves it.
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Who
Program leaders, Tutors, Students, Parents
Problems mapped
96
Today
85 solved, 9 partly solved, 2 coming soon
Program leaders
- No evidence on which program design works
- Hard to judge teaching skill before hiring
- New tutors take too long to be ready
- Little baseline on each student’s needs
- Matching students to tutors by hand
- Poor fits and mid-term changes linger
- Audio and video fail mid-lesson
- Getting the right materials to every tutor
- No shared standard for good teaching
- Too few lessons are ever observed
- Coaches can’t give every tutor feedback
- Delivery drifts from the model across sites
- Underperformance is hard to prove fairly
- Under-dosed students spotted too late
- Hard to show tutoring caused the growth
- Engagement and satisfaction go unmeasured
- Research takes months of data wrangling
- Schools don’t know what tutoring covers
Tutors
- Unready for their first real students
- Learning the tools in front of students
- Matched with students who don’t fit
- Meeting a new student cold
- Deciding what each student needs next
- Hours spent finding and making materials
- Echo, noise and frozen video
- Every student on a different device
- Writing math and diagrams with a mouse
- Juggling slides, videos and websites
- Hands-on ideas don’t work on a screen
- Students looking at the wrong spot
- No shared language with the student
- Building rapport through a screen
- Attention drifts, young kids most of all
- Quiet students, and the tutor talks most
- Differentiating for a whole group at once
- Disruptions and meddling with others’ work
- Students who don’t want to be there
- Running out of time, ending late
- Can’t see a student’s work as they do it
- Can’t see who’s stuck in a group
- “I get it” that isn’t true
- Hours lost to grading homework
- Feedback that’s vague, late or ignored
- Not knowing when to slow down or move on
- Remembering where each student left off
- Practice between lessons doesn’t happen
- Inheriting students with no context
- Catching up after absences and summers
- Not knowing what the class is covering
- No one watches them teach
- No clear path to raises or promotion
- Signs of harm or distress go unnoticed
- Inappropriate content or uninvited people
Students
- Bad connection, can’t hear the tutor
- Joining from a noisy, crowded room
- Too many controls for young or new students
- Accommodations missing in the lesson
- Nervous with a new tutor
- Uneasy on camera, with home on view
- Afraid of being wrong in front of peers
- Strangers or bullies in the lesson
- Unsure who sees their work and data
- A lesson pitched at someone else’s level
- Messy boards and abstract explanations
- Learning in a second language
- Too shy to interrupt and ask
- Losing their place on the board
- Hard to write math, code or text on screen
- Shy, or drowned out by others
- Group work online falls flat
- Rushed, held back, or work erased
- Online tests that don’t fit how they work
- Other tabs, phones and games
- Tired, or having a bad day
- Work that feels boring and irrelevant
- No say in goals or activities
- “I’m just bad at this”
- Effort that goes unnoticed
- Forgetting what was covered last time
- Homework at the wrong level, no feedback
- Stuck, with no one to ask until next week
- AI that gives answers, not understanding
- Tutoring that doesn’t match class
- Feedback that’s only right or wrong
- Can’t see how far they’ve come
- Unsure what to work on next
- No idea if they’re ready for the test
- A new tutor who doesn’t know them
- Lessons cancelled or tutors missing
Parents
The features behind these fixes
- AI Interviewer
- Lesson Summaries
- Sparky AI Tutor (coming soon)
- Luna
- AI Autograder
- AI Lesson Generator (coming soon)
- Accommodation Profiles (coming soon)
- Post-session Survey
- Wellbeing Check-ins (coming soon)
See it in a live Space.
We’ll walk you through it, shaped around how you teach.
