We are committed to strengthening the community by supporting families, connecting resources, and cultivating positive relationships that lead to improved lives, academic advancement, individual growth, and increased opportunity. We accomplish this through a number of services and program initiatives including high-dose and high-impact tutoring personalized to address the needs of individual learners with learning differences who are also experiencing academic challenges.
PeerLab first started with a core group of passionate high school students wanting to provide peer-based academic support. Through our interactive site, students can sign up for one-time or recurring sessions. Once matched with a student, tutors will schedule a Zoom/Google Meet.
A Yancy Life brings an innovative blended math, science, and reading assistance program that combines classroom instruction with computer-aided learning. Study Island, a Web-based standards mastery program, is the basis of Yancy's instruction in English/Language Arts (ELA), Math and Science. While each student is given log in credentials, and Study Island is, in itself, a full on-line instructional program for individual learning, student use of Study Island is limited during daily instruction.
DISD is part of a national collaborative working with researchers at Brown University to study how to maximize the impact of tutoring. Brown’s National Student Support Accelerator points to research showing that tutoring interventions can translate to between three and 15 additional months of learning.
All tutoring programs and especially new tutoring programs need improvement. Continuous improvement systems allow you to gather, act on and share the information needed to reach and exceed program goals and inform and build support from stakeholders.
This section offers solutions to common challenges concerning student enrollment and attendance. Use the recommendations proactively to establish systems early: enrollment and attendance are non-negotiable necessities for a tutoring program to succeed, and they do not happen automatically.
A Landscape Analysis outlines the strengths, resources, and needs of a particular school district. It provides a framework for designing a service and ensuring that it is embedded directly in the needs of the district.
Once you have identified the schools where tutoring will happen and selected the students who will receive it, you are ready to tackle the logistical challenge of scheduling when and where your program’s tutoring sessions will take place.
All students can benefit from high-impact tutoring, but you will probably need to prioritize which students receive this tutoring, at least in the short-run. Once you have chosen a focus area (subject and grade level) and identified partner schools for your program, the next step is to select which students at each school will receive tutoring. The district should create overall guidelines for schools to make these decisions.
Choosing schools whose communities are fully invested in your program’s success will help you optimize your model more quickly. Prioritizing the schools whose students need tutoring most will ensure that your program can make a meaningful impact at any scale.
Does this school need this program?