[Michele Doney]

Hello all! There are so many national organizations related to what we do– ATP, NCLCA, CRLA, NADE, ACTLA… and the list goes on. To what organizations do you belong? Do you attend the conferences? Any suggestions for especially great conferences?

[Michele Doney]

I’ve had good luck getting PSC professional development grants to go to ATP every year. I’d like to widen my reach and try CRLA or NCLCA, but it’s hard for me to be absent from the center in the fall semester. If anybody has attended one of them and cares to share their experiences, I’d love to hear about it!

[Marisol Jimenez]

Hi Michelle, I’ve attended NCLCA and NTA. I thought NTA had a lot of sessions that focused on tutoring in a private setting. There were conference presenters from colleges and universities, but I think they were outnumbered by the participants who were running private tutoring businesses. That could have changed, however, but I am not connected to their work and can’t say that for sure. I have attended NCLCA twice and left each conference with good ideas that I’ve been able to utilize in developing our tutor training workshops. It seems to have a large membership and conference participants are many of the people who are active in learning center circles. I know less about CRLA but it seems like a big confernece. They seem to focus both on issues of tutoring and teaching. Both posts their conference programs online so one why to decide between the two might be to look at what they’ve offered in the past.
What have you thought of the ATP conferences?

[Marisol Jimenez]

I meant to write “way” versus “why.” Sorry!

[Marisol Jimenez]

By the way, we belong to CRLA and NCLCA.

[Alana Philip]

Membership in CRLA is one of the long term goals of the SEEK Academic Support Center. I would like to attend their conference in November of this year. As our Center is just embarking on creating a robust training program, I am using the CRLA as one of our guides for creating the modules.
Our new Director indicated to me that if our tutors attain ATP certification, it will enhance our future application for CRLA certification.

[joyce bavlinka]

i would like to attend a conference this year — any suggestion on which conferences are generally the best?

[Arthur Ford]

I have attended the NCLCA conference (once) and NADE conferences (twice). Both have been very useful and productive. I haven’t been to CRLA. I’d say both NCLCA and NADE are equally good as far as the content of presentations, etc. The major differences I’ve noticed between the two are that NADE comes across as more of a corporate-efficient, more impersonal organization while NCLCA has more of a personal, small-time operation feel (there are pluses and minuses to each style here, of course); also, NADE’s attendees seem to be from institutions spread across the USA with perhaps a focus on the east coast, while NCLCA membership seems significantly weighted toward the midwest – which makes sense since they evolved from a regional midwest organization. I’d say either is worth your while, based upon timing and such.

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