Learn Like Me
A weekly Learn Like Me tutoring session in an elementary school library

Our program

Every week, we show up.

Same tutors, same students, same library tables — all school year long. That consistency is the whole design.

How a session works

An elementary student concentrating on a writing exercise

Teachers tell us what's needed

Our partner elementary schools point us to the students and the skills — usually reading, writing, and math — where an extra hour of one-on-one attention goes furthest.

A Learn Like Me tutor working through a workbook with a student

Tutors travel to the school

Trained high school volunteers come to the students — not the other way around. Sessions happen at the elementary school, during or right after the school day.

Tutors and students working on a creative project together at a classroom table

The same faces come back

Tutors keep their students for the whole year. Academic help is the vehicle; the relationship — an older student who shows up and believes in you — is the engine.

Why tutoring? Because it works.

Consistent, in-person tutoring is one of the best-evidenced interventions in all of education. A meta-analysis of roughly 96 randomized controlled trials found that tutoring programs increase learning by the equivalent of 3 to 15 additional months of school — and the effects tend to be strongest in the earliest grades, especially for early-grade reading.

Nickow, Oreopoulos & Quan, The Impressive Effects of Tutoring on PreK-12 Learning (peer-reviewed in American Educational Research Journal, 2024); months-of-learning framing per the Stanford National Student Support Accelerator.

That's the model we run: small groups, weekly cadence, the same tutor all year, in partnership with the classroom teacher. We didn't invent it — we just committed to doing it, for free, at schools that can't buy it.

Students and tutors playing together on the playground at recess

And recess counts too.

Not every hour is worksheets. Some of the most important minutes of a session happen on the swings — where our students get to be kids with someone who's there just for them.

See a session in photos →

Want this at your school?

If you're an Indianapolis educator or administrator, we'd love to talk about a partnership. If you're a high school student, we'll train you.

Talk to us →