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Nearly $2 billion in federal pandemic aid is landing in the bank accounts of Dallas-area schools to help students recover from the pandemic.
The money — which state leaders announced this spring would flow to Texas schools — has a few strings attached. Districts must spend it on addressing student needs.
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Techfunic offers personalized online co-learning for children resulting in higher STEM proficiency. Your child interacts with live friends and tutors, not lifeless videos. Techfunic matches a maximum of 3 children with a tutor, creating small pods ensuring participative engagement in all children, resulting in higher grades, social skills and confidence in children over-time and enhancing their self-esteem.
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?
Implement High-Impact Tutoring
Selecting Students
Scheduling Sessions
Tutor training is required to fill gaps between your selection criteria and your ideal tutor’s qualities. While the level of training required depends on tutor experience and student-tutor ratio, pre-service training alone will not be sufficient. All tutor types perform better with direction and coaching.
Your tutors are your program’s most important asset. To find the best tutors for the role, you must clearly define required qualifications and ideal qualities, prioritize them based on your district context and program model, and design an intentional recruitment and selection strategy to build a diverse cohort of tutors that will meet your scale goals while remaining within your tutoring program’s budget.
Model Design involves several steps including understanding the needs of your district by conducting a District Landscape Analysis< developing a logic model to map how your program will address these needs and then making a series of consistent and coherent choices along various model design dimensions based on this information. Conducting a District Landscape Analysis is covered in Section 1: Lay the Foundation.
You may opt to build a new program from the ground up, leveraging the existing systems in your district and the talent pool in your community. Both with regard to program design and implementation, when a district grows its own program it has more choices to make; with this greater autonomy comes greater control over outcomes, but also greater risk of implementing ineffective practices.
Your district’s degree of collaboration with a provider will depend on the program model and the level of logistics and support needed from the district to implement the program. Ideally, a tutoring provider will operate as a strategic partner, supporting the district to continuously reflect and improve upon the tutoring program.
Most districts will require formal contracts to be in place before work with a provider can begin, but even if your district does not, an agreement or Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) should be in place before work begins. This helps you and your provider align your expectations and incentives at the outset, preemptively solving problems before they arise.
Before drawing up your contract, check your district’s policies for any limitations on the following:
An RFP may be required depending on the scale of your program and the regulations in your district. If so, understanding the approval process is critical. Some districts may require approval from the school board, while others may allow district employees to sign off.
Thousands of organizations identify themselves as tutoring organizations, but few will be a strong match for your district’s needs. Selecting a provider can be straightforward by following the steps outlined in this section and using the provided tools. You can start by identifying potential providers on the National Student Support Accelerator’s website or by using a request for proposal process.
High-Impact Tutoring programs are difficult to design and implement effectively. When possible, relying on an organization with a track record of doing both successfully can increase the likelihood that your own district’s tutoring program will be successful. Your Focus Area for tutoring is largely determined by the unmet needs in your own district; these needs may represent gaps in your district’s expertise or implementation.
Once you have completed initial planning, the next critical task is designing the tutoring program. Districts may choose to partner with a tutoring provider and use the provider’s program design, design and grow their own tutoring program or pursue a hybrid approach. If you have not done so already, learn more about how to choose an approach for your district in Tutoring Approach: Partner with a Provider, Grow Your Own Program or Hybrid?
Tutoring programs rely on diverse groups of stakeholders: not just the students and caregivers the program serves and the tutors, teachers, and administrators who implement it, but also the district superintendents and local government who approve budgets and the other community partners who support the program. If any of these groups are not invested in your program, successful implementation becomes more difficult.
Significant funding is available to fund tutoring programs. This section outlines funding sources district leaders can consider as they determine how to financially support their tutoring program as well as key considerations that can help district leaders decide how to approach funding.
When implemented effectively, tutoring programs can have a significant impact on student outcomes, making these programs well worth the investment of time and funding. It is important for your district to fully understand the costs of running an effective tutoring program and determine how that program will be funded. Costs estimates for high-impact tutoring programs range considerably from $1,000 to over $3,000 per pupil.
Click Here to go to the Accelerator-Designed Tutoring Survey Instruments
Overview: How do data drive improvement?
Collecting and analyzing data lets you make improvements in a targeted, strategic way. It allows your program to:
Regardless of your approach to implementing tutoring, your district must make four main decisions that will impact the level of centralized capacity and staffing needed:
Successful implementation of High-Impact tutoring requires planning the process in detail ahead of time. The tool below includes a series of checklists to keep track of the steps needed to get tutoring up and running in your district. It also includes rough timeline estimates, though these will vary depending on the size of your district, the needs of your community, and the scope of your tutoring program.
Research shows that High-Impact Tutoring is unusually effective for accelerating student learning. In fact it is more effective than other interventions that have been tested and is effective across grade and content levels. This Workbook is designed to accompany High-Impact Tutoring: District Playbook and is for school district staff interested in implementing High-Impact Tutoring programs in their districts.
Planning for High-Impact Tutoring
Once you have set clear goals for your tutoring program, you need to determine how your district will approach the day-to-day implementation of High-Impact Tutoring. Three approaches are common: