Providing tutoring for students who need academic support is one of the most critical steps schools can take to close equity gaps and accelerate student progress. With virtual tutoring, it’s also one of the most scaleable ways to address those gaps.
Of course, just adding tutoring in schools isn’t enough. Making a true different in student outcomes comes down to the implementation of your district or school tutoring program. This is especially true when it comes to partnering with a virtual tutoring program to close students’ foundational reading skills gaps.
What does tutoring looks like in the schools where students are achieving the most reading growth?
Can these success stories offer you a roadmap to ensure your tutoring partnership will have a positive impact on student success?
To help you craft a tutoring partnership that puts student success at the center, we’ve developed this step-by-step guide to implementing tutoring in your school.
Learn how to get teachers on board with this intervention option, when to schedule tutoring sessions, how to measure the effectiveness of tutoring, and more.
Implementing Successful Tutoring for Students
1. Opt for a High-Dosage Tutoring Model
The number of schools offering tutoring for students has taken off in recent years — four in five public schools now offer at least one type of tutoring to students. The types on offer vary with some districts mandating teachers set aside a certain number of hours for tutoring to peer-to-peer options that enlist high-performing students as tutors.
The most effective method is high-dosage or high-impact tutoring — researchers have found the model gives students an average of more than four months of additional learning in elementary literacy.
To qualify as “high-dosage tutoring,” your program should be:
- Offered at school, ideally during the school day
- Delivered at least 3 times per week; ideally 5 days
- Aligned to the school’s evidence-based Tier 1 curriculum
- Taught with high-quality instructional materials
- Built on a low student-to-tutor ration; ideally one-to-one
- Led by qualified professional tutors
- Driven by diagnostic and progress monitoring data
- Able to provide sustained and strong relationships between tutors and students
2. Make Room During the School Day for Tutoring Sessions
For decades, tutoring has largely been relegated to after-school programs. This has served to exacerbate educational inequalities as many families who lack transportation options or have other obligations during the after-school hours are unable to take advantage of these programs.
What’s more, researchers have found after-school tutoring programs across the nation show limited uptake as they compete against other after-school activities, and parents may worry about adding more time onto an already lengthy school day.
By making room in your school day for your students’ tutoring sessions, you eliminate those barriers, providing more equitable access for students from all socioeconomic backgrounds.
If you’re worried about losing instructional time, keep in mind you have options. Consider scheduling tutoring:
- During center time
- During a specific intervention block where kids may rotate between different interventions
- Another time during the day that doesn’t interfere with Tier 1 instruction in core content areas
The Key to Scheduling: Teachers
Involving teachers in the scheduling decision is key, says Kim Snyder, a K-12 ELA specialist in the Durango 9R School District in Durango, Colo. Many students in the district receive daily early literacy tutoring from Ignite Reading during WIN (What I Need) time so that they won’t miss out on core ELA instruction.
“Be open to having the time for kids to go [to tutoring] where teachers don’t feel like they’re losing them for something important,” Snyder advises.
3. Schedule Student Tutoring Sessions Every Day
“During the school day” isn’t the only scheduling consideration that will help you maximize the impact of tutoring for students.
Research has consistently found kids need consistency in tutoring, with daily sessions proving the gold standard for improving student outcomes. Among those benefits:
- Students progress more quickly in their skills
- Tutors are able to foster trust and a student-tutor relationship that contribute to SEL — a powerful motivator when kids are persisting through challenging content
And yet, when University of Southern California researchers looked at schools that reported they offer high-impact tutoring, they found that the tutoring dosage being offered to most students was simply not enough to qualify as “high impact” as just 25 percent of students were scheduled to meet with their tutors at least three times per week.
Similarly, when researchers at the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research examined tutoring programs at 12 districts in 10 states, they found the districts that had planned to offer students 30 to 60 hours of tutoring per year actually provided just 12 to 14 hours of the service.
For maximum impact, carve out time for short periods of intervention time every day of the week, and ensure that time is consistently scheduled.
4. Bring School Staff Along on the Journey
Are you wondering what your school staff will think of adding high-impact tutoring for students? The time to talk about it is now.
Teacher buy-in is crucial to the success of tutoring in schools, and the majority of American teachers support the concept.
When researchers at Stanford University surveyed teachers to learn their perspectives on high-impact tutoring, they found the news was overwhelmingly positive. Teachers told the researchers they consider it one of their best ways to address student learning loss. Just 2 percent of teachers in the survey said that they do not support embedding tutoring into the school day at all.
Not surprisingly, the primary reason teachers say they support high-dosage tutoring is the simple fact that it will help their students.
As one teacher told Stanford’s researchers:
“Students would benefit by having the one-to-one experience and learning at their pace to clarify instructions or provide more prompts to get them thinking about the topic. It would provide another way of accessing the curriculum.”
With 25 individual students in a classroom — all with different learning needs – one teacher does not have the bandwidth to differentiate reading instruction for all 25. That’s where tutoring comes in, and it’s one of the many reasons teachers are quick to proclaim the benefits.
Talking to your teaching staff early on ensures they’re partners in the process, rather than onlookers, and it allows them to provide their own valuable insights into their students’ needs.
Teachers can identify which students will best be served by high-impact tutoring, prepare their students for the program, and encourage positive behaviors that will ensure student success.
Once the program is launched, teachers are among those who can best leverage data from your tutoring partner as well, reinforcing the skills kids need with extra practice.
The more involved teachers are allowed to be, the more they can support their students.
5. Share Important Student Information With Your Tutoring Partner
Thanks to the structure of high-dosage tutoring, tutors are able to provide individualized instruction to every student — something that can be next to impossible for a single classroom teacher with a room full of 25 to 30 students.
To help tutors truly tailor instruction, however, your partner needs to be armed with a complete picture of the student’s needs and how they best access information. This includes historical data on learning styles, insights into accommodations in a students’ IEP, and the native language spoken by a multilingual learner.
Protecting Student Information
Wary of sharing students’ personally identifiable information (PII)? Your tutoring partner should have a process in place to keep PII safe.
Don’t be afraid to ask about their policy on protecting students’ information.
6. Prioritize Tutoring Session Attendance
There’s a clear line between student attendance in the classroom and student success, and the same can be said for attendance in tutoring sessions. Spotty attendance results in learning loss and requires tutors to revisit the same material over and over again.
Fortunately, you have a little extra help here. High-impact tutoring has been found to boost student attendance by as much as 7 percent. Because students enjoy their sessions so much, it motivates them to attend school.
You can keep this momentum going with a few simple things:
- Block out students’ regular tutoring sessions, and try not to schedule other school events at the same time. This ensures students involved in tutoring don’t feel punished because they have to miss out on the fun assembly to attend tutoring.
- Ensure the district IT department has been looped into the process, so they can quickly address technology issues that would present students from attending their tutoring sessions.
- Keep parents and guardians informed about students’ progress in the program to fuel their investment and leverage their partnership to ensure students don’t miss a session.
- Remind students about upcoming tutoring sessions with verbal reminders, texts sent home to caregivers, and a spot on visual schedules in the classroom.
7. Use Your Tutoring Data Wisely
Effective tutoring programs use data to assess their own effectiveness at improving student learning and make needed adjustments to instruction. Your tutoring partner should be able to provide your district or school with all of that data, so use it wisely!
You can make the most of the numbers you receive by:
- Using a data-driven approach to select students — Your data can tell you which students will benefit most from intervention. It will also help you determine when students who have reached educational goals can “graduate” from in-school tutoring.
- Keeping teachers in the data loop — This enables them to make data-informed decisions as they reinforce students’ learning in the classroom.
- Sharing data with parents and guardians — Keeping parents and guardians apprised of their students’ progress in a tutoring program goes a long way in driving family investment in the program. This can show up in better attendance and better behavior too.
8. Create a Waiting List for Tutoring Services
As your students work one-to-one with their tutors to master their skills, they’ll reach goals — such as mastering foundational reading skills — that will set them up for academic success.
That means they’ll be able to graduate from the tutoring program and open a seat for other students to get that same targeted intervention!
About Ignite Reading
IIgnite Reading is a literacy company with a bold mission: End the reading crisis that’s gripped our nation for decades by ensuring every child in America learns to read on time (ideally by the end of 1st grade).
Districts nationwide partner with us to deliver the early literacy intervention their students need at a scale to match.
Powered by a Science of Reading-based curriculum and driven by data, our high-dosage virtual tutoring program pairs each student with a tutor educator trained to deliver personalized Science of Reading-aligned instruction. Students get daily 1:1 attention, plus a caring, supportive champion helping them build the confidence and skills they need to become fluent readers.
Researchers at the Center for Research and Reform in Education at Johns Hopkins University call Ignite Reading “a scalable solution to accelerate early literacy outcomes for high-need students.”
