New partnership with UVA medical students a win-win

This year, through an exciting new partnership with UVA’s Social Issues in Medicine (SIM) course, first year medical students served as tutors in our Johnson Tutoring program. SIM gives the future doctors an opportunity to work with different populations in order to further develop important social skills and think about social determinants of health. Each week during the school year, six first year medical students showed up faithfully to tutor Kindergarten through 4^th grade students in reading. They left with a deeper appreciation for the young people who were teaching them about what it’s like to be a kid these days. There were many smiles, laughs, and memorable moments.

Medical student Kimberly Boatman said she looked forward to tutoring each week and expressed her desire to continue hanging out with her tutee, JaMonte, in the future. In addition to tutoring, the medical students conducted a research project evaluating growth in reading fluency and overall outcomes of early reading intervention. As a culminating activity, the students created a poster (below) and presented their findings at the SIM Community Poster Session.

We were grateful to be able to watch the medical students form relationships with the elementary students and realize that although many of them were from very different backgrounds, they actually had many things in common. We are thankful for the opportunity to have been a site for this new program and hope to continue hosting medical students in the future who can learn from and bond with our awesome tutoring students! You can check out pictures of the six tutoring pairs below.