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In Your Corner, Student Learning
Acceleration, Tutoring, or Intervention: When to Choose Which Approach
When school opened this fall the unevenness in learning gains from the past year was on everyone’s mind. “Catching students up” academically along with attending to their social and emotional needs were highest priorities. Now several months into the year, both issues remain crucial to helping students find success and remain successful.
For many students the task of “catching up” academically has remained a serious challenge. Certainly, there are many reasons for the continued struggle some learners are experiencing. Among the factors behind the lack of progress many students are experiencing is a mismatch in the type of support they are receiving and their learning needs.
Not surprisingly, some students need more and different support than others. For some students, a narrower focus and integration of previously learned content and skills with current learning expectations is enough to put them back on track. Others have significant content knowledge and skill gaps, but the skills underlying their learning are solid and can support ongoing progress. Still others are missing one or more key underlying learning competencies that interfere with their learning. Even when they temporarily catch up, they tend to fall behind over time due to the absence of these key competencies. We might think of the broad strategies available to address areas where learning has lagged in three categories: acceleration, tutoring, and intervention.
Acceleration has been a preferred strategy for many educators who seek to address relatively small learning gaps opened over the past year. Acceleration narrows the focus of learning challenges presented to students while combining current learning expectations with review and reintroduction of past content and skills. This strategy can be effective if learning gaps are manageable and students possess the necessary underlying competencies to construct new learning. In fact, acceleration has been a good option for most students.
Tutoring has also been a popular strategy to help some students with larger learning gaps to “catch up.” Recent research from the University of Chicago found tutoring to be a potent way to help students improve, especially in reading and math. Importantly, students need to experience tutoring daily and the support needs to focus on the specific areas of knowledge and skills in need of growth. Tutoring appears to be most effective when students have larger gaps in content knowledge and academic skills but possess core underlying learning competencies. Tutoring addresses missing information that, once absorbed, can restore them to an expected learning pace that can be sustained long-term.
Intervention, the third and most intensive strategy, goes beyond academic content and skills to focus on specific learning competencies and processes that stand in the way of students moving forward at an acceptable pace. This deeper level of skills intervention focuses on elements such as: information processing speed, sustaining attention, maintaining focus, and auditory and visual processing. Without these skills students may be able to make progress with close assistance, but they fall back once support is removed and they are expected to learn independently.
Unfortunately, many students have failed to make expected progress this fall due to a mismatch in the support they need and the support they are receiving. For example, providing tutoring when intervention is needed can be a waste of time in that a student may temporarily catch up, only to fall behind as new content and skills are introduced. Conversely, acceleration may be adequate if revisiting and reinforcing information or filling in small gaps are all that is required for a student to get back on track. The key, obviously, is to focus on the learning profile of students to ensure that key underlying learning competencies are present, assess whether the content and skills needed will require tutoring or can be addressed through acceleration, and respond with what each student needs.
In Your Corner, Student Learning
Rediscovering Joy: A Front Row Seat to Learning
The opening of school this year featured a variety of distractions, pressures, and expectations for everyone in the education community. Students were returning from a year of disruption that threatened to carry over into the new year. Educators were asked to “catch students up” with curricular expectations despite wide variations in readiness for new learning and the ongoing presence of the virus. Families worried about virus spread mitigation efforts while also wondering whether their children’s learning would continue to suffer from ongoing pandemic challenges.
Certainly, there are reasons for concern about the current context for learning. Still, the challenges we face do not have to diminish the wonder and delight learning brings. We can choose to focus on the distractions or we can choose to deal with challenges while also keeping our focus on the magic of learning and the hope it offers for the future.
As educators, we have the privilege of “sitting in a front row seat” to learning. We are there when students grasp a new concept. We can witness growing confidence as students practice a newly learned skill. We can delight in students seeing a new perspective and experiencing a new insight. We are privileged to be present as students grow and take on new learning challenges.
Equally important, we are privileged to influence the learning processes we see. The experiences we design, the coaching we offer, and the encouragement we provide make this amazing learning journey possible. We are both architects and observers of one of the most important processes in life. What happens in our classes today can build confidence to face the next learning challenge or launch a lifelong pursuit of learning and discovery.
Yet, like most experiences, how we choose to see and the meaning we assign to the experience will heavily influence our response to it. We can fret about how far behind our students may be in relation to the expectations of the curriculum, even though we know that learning does not happen on a predetermined timeline. The richness and value of learning is not determined by when it happens. We can try to hurry our students through the experience and risk missing its magic, or we can focus on the moment and its significance in the larger learning journey. We can direct the attention of our students to the next test, or we can invite them to appreciate and celebrate what they are accomplishing.
Of course, our students look to us to interpret and explain the meaning they should be taking from their learning experience. Our delight and optimism and our appreciation and enthusiasm have an impact on how they view the learning in which they are engaged. Conversely, we can give in to stresses and expectations and allow impatience and urgency to dominate our work with students and risk draining the wonder and delight learning can offer.
We write the learning story we offer to our students. When we pause occasionally to appreciate and share the wonder of learning with our students, we invite them to see their challenges and struggles in a new light. We can choose to succumb to the pressure and urgency to meet largely artificial benchmarks for learning progress, or we can decide to experience the magic of learning and our “front row seat” to the process. Our choice will determine whether we constantly rediscover the joy of learning as we accompany our students on their journey of discovery and growth.
In Your Corner, Student Learning
In Your Corner, Student Learning
In Your Corner, Student Learning
In Your Corner, Leadership and Change Management
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