Our Program Mixes The Best Of Test Prep With Traditional Summer Fun

Yleana is a community built not just around SAT® score improvement, but weekly campfires, group activities, and lifelong friendships. This sense of community enriches the program and also helps us motivate and inspire our students.

By The Numbers

• 150 point score improvement, on average, in a three-week period since 2016 (when the SAT® exam changed)

• 6:1 student to staff ratio

• 2 teachers per classroom of 6-10 students

• 120 hours of intensive SAT® instruction

• 5 proctored practice tests

• 3 weeks of living like a college student

• Over 400 students and staff (and counting!) forever changed

Socratic Teaching

The Socratic method underlies everything we do at Yleana. Our ideal classroom involves a teacher presenting ideas and students learning by applying them and asking questions about them.

For many of our students, accustomed to an urban education in which the teacher stands in front of the room and lectures, Yleana is the first time they’re required to have opinions and engage actively with curriculum.

This is an empowering experience for students. Many say that Yleana was the first time they felt truly challenged academically, while also being supported and lovingly encouraged in the classroom.

Classroom Environment

We emphasize small group and individualized instruction. All of our classrooms have two teachers. The high teacher-to-student ratio gives teachers the flexibility to create different groups for each lesson, each day. Team teaching means that our teachers have more energy, are better able to manage their classrooms, have the time and resources to design new lessons, and are able to give students one-on-one lessons. Our students never have to sit through classroom lectures that aren’t specific to their needs, and each student gets highly personalized instruction.

Students are put in different classes for each SAT® subject — reading, writing, and math — and are grouped with other students who are at their same approximate level. As a result, students neither get bored with a class moving too slowly, nor get left behind by a class moving too fast.

We believe that paying attention to each student’s individual needs is crucial to their success. We create an environment in which each student has opportunities for both one-on-one and small group work with teachers, so they can ask the questions they really have and teachers can better assess student understanding.

The Yleana classroom is dynamic; we endeavor to teach through competitions, games, and interactive activities as much as possible. We believe that learning involves some measure of noise and chaos, and we welcome that: we see our score improvements bear out our method, and we hear our students rave about their experience at Yleana.

Extraordinary Teachers

Our teachers have to have both a strong SAT® knowledge base and a dedication to educating and mentoring our students. In order to work at Yleana, staff must score above the 90th percentile on both sections of the SAT® exam. Even more important than demonstrated SAT® aptitude, though, is creativity, flexibility, and the ability to inspire our students, both in and out of the classroom.

The job of an Yleana instructor doesn’t end when the class day does. Our teachers meet with students during free time for extra study practice. They give students advice about college. They play sports, help choreograph dances for the talent show, share s’mores at campfire, celebrate accomplishments, laugh together, and come to feel like family.

What makes Yleana teachers extraordinary is not just their ability to teach the SAT® exam — every SAT® program should be able to say that — but it’s their ability to ensure that every Yleana attendee goes home not just with an improved score, but with lifelong summer memories.

Game-ification

Games are a constant at Yleana, both in and out of the classroom.

At the beginning of the program, students are placed on coaching teams. These are teams that mix up the classes, so students are able to work with students they may not see in their classes. Coaching teams learn together in a variety of contexts: they play SAT® games designed to test key concepts and support each other during test return each Sunday. Each coaching team has a teacher as its coach, and every student meets weekly with their coach to set realistic goals and discuss their progress on the practice tests.

Coaching teams are one of several ways we seek to ensure students have multiple teachers they can talk to about their academic progress. Equally important is the coaching team’s role in helping to create community around SAT® study by encouraging students to help one another succeed.

Score Metrics

As students master each strategy and concept necessary for the SAT® exam, they put their expertise to work through five full practice tests, all in a real-feel environment with a proctor. Tests are graded and, three times per session, we conduct test return where students review their test performance with a personalized score report broken down by section and question type.

Our computer algorithms analyze students' tests, producing detailed score reports for the students and class reports for the teachers. These score reports, designed in-house for maximum impact, give our students feedback on their areas for improvement and our teachers classroom feedback by question type and concept.

The student score reports show score progress over time, as well as a breakdown of each section of the test by concept. Students can quickly evaluate the concepts they are doing well on and target concepts they want to focus more on in the coming weeks. The reports encourage students to engage deeply with the tests they take: they force students not to focus on the numerical score at the expense of understanding their own strengths. The reports also give students agency over the test; by identifying specific areas of improvement, students are better able to direct their own practice.

Follow-Up Program

The follow-up program is held every year after the end of the second session of the program and consists of four separate days, each run like a day of the program, to maintain the students’ score gains from the summer. The follow-up program is taught by Yleana teachers, to maintain continuity between the summer session, and is held on a college campus in each of our partner cities (Baltimore, Boston area, New York City, and Philadelphia).

The follow-up program is mandatory for all accepted students in order to ensure our students maintain the progress they make during the summer into their scheduled SAT® exam date in August.