The Tutorial Format:

An Innovative Mode of Graduate Education

For many years, The Professional School of Psychology offered its graduate programs primarily through a Residential Format. Students attended class one or two times a month--usually on weekends. While this format enables mature, accomplished adults to work full-time while attending graduate school, it did not allow for the full flexibility that is needed for many of these adult learners as they face the increasingly complex and demanding conditions of the 21st Century. In order to go to school on weekends, PSP students in our residential program often had to sacrifice time with their family or the time they needed to rejuvenate themselves after a busy work week.

We have also discovered that our incoming students need a program that is much more closely tailored to their own unique educational needs and interests. While PSP classes have always been geared for the mature learner and have always been set at an advanced level for learners who want "cutting edge" knowledge and skills, there is still the challenge of meeting each students's unique needs and interests--regardless of the level of instruction that is offered.

Given these exceptional challenges, PSP is now engaged in a unique tutorial model that enables each student to receive individualized instruction that is offered at a time and location and in a format that fits with their busy life. While the new tutorial model at PSP is in many ways beholding to the tutorial processes of the 19th Century European universities, it also makes full use of the technologies of the 21st Century. To a varying extent for each student, the PSP senior tutorial model embraces not only individual face-to-face meetings between the tutor and student, but also email communication, teleconferencing and various internet-based modes of interactive communication (such as the digitally-based and highly-advanced educatoional platform called "ad-learn"). Each prospective student who is interested in one of PSP's senior tutorial programs engages in a Ten-Step Process that begins with the application and ends with completion of the degree program.

For more information about our Tutor-Based Programs click here.