Hi, I'm Dan Lerman. For twenty years, families have flown me around the world to tutor the SAT. Now I train the tutors.
I founded the Columbia Professional Tutoring Program at Teachers College, Columbia University — the country's only university-backed tutor training program. It's built on one conviction: great tutoring deserves to be taken seriously, and it can be taught as a craft.
A little secret about great tutoring: almost nobody is trained to do it. Tutors learn by accident, one student at a time, over years. I wanted to teach it on purpose.
The Columbia Professional Tutoring Program is housed in the Department of Cognitive Science at Teachers College, Columbia University. It's for people who take this work seriously — aspiring tutors, working tutors, academic coaches, and transitioning teachers. We fuse cognitive science, pedagogy, and applied practice: real tutoring sessions analyzed line by line, mentorship, micro-teaching with honest peer review, and a capstone project at the end.
Why me? I won't call myself the world's best tutor. Superlatives teach students exactly the wrong lesson — that ability is a ranking instead of a practice. So here are facts instead. I hold a PhD in Cognitive Science in Education from Columbia, where I am on faculty. I hold degrees from Duke and Georgetown, and I've taught students from 36 countries on 6 continents. I was the keynote speaker at the National Test Prep Association Conference in 2025, speaking on the professionalization of tutoring. Every summer I run intensive SAT boot camps in London and New York, and I make videos for the 110,000+ subscribers on Scalar Learning's YouTube channel.
What I do best has never changed: connection, empathy, and expertise. The program exists to teach tutors to build the same into their practice.
If you're a family, this is what's behind the results. If you're a tutor, this is the training I wish had existed when I started.
