Implementation and Sustainability: What Makes High-Impact Tutoring Work

This session continued CGLR’s emphasis on high-impact tutoring as one of several“big bets” and smart investments identified by CGLR  to accelerate learning recovery. We have been heartened to see that more and more schools and communities are making a significant investment in this strategy over the past few years and sought to use this week’s session to pivot from adoption of high-impact tutoring to successful implementation over time. Acknowledging the challenges of implementation — such as finding tutors, scheduling, alignment with classroom learning, and other factors — this session gave participants the chance to learn from national, state, and local leaders about what they have done to make this intervention effective.

We began the discussion by engaging with two national tutoring leaders — Nakia Towns, Ed.D., of Accelerate: The National Collaborative for Accelerated Learning and Kate Cochran of the Partnership for Student Success — who have conducted extensive research and engaged with multiple educators to support their touring initiatives. They described what research tells us about “implementation science;” what they have seen across states and districts in terms of ensuring program fidelity in diverse locations; and what tools are most useful to ensure tutoring aligns with classroom instruction. After emphasizing the importance of “dosage” and the need for students to receive tutoring at regular intervals over time to make an impact, Towns highlighted the “enabling conditions” that need to be in place for effective implementation:

One of the things that we noted is that the enabling conditions have to be there. And by that we mean scheduling, we mean physical space, [and] we mean the coordination between the tier one classroom teacher being able to identify the students that you want to prioritize for high-impact tutoring, which means aligning it with your tiered support structures, MTSS, RTI….And the most successful places that we’ve seen with implementation means that there is someone in that school who wakes up thinking about the high-impact tutoring program and how the students are going to be able to receive the services at the dosage level that would make a difference and to really be able to monitor progress with data throughout the year.

We continued the conversation with three state and district leaders — Karla Hudson of Portland Public Schools in Oregon; Holly Manson of the Louisiana Department of Education; and Elizabeth Ross of the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) in Washington, D.C. — who have had great success with high-impact tutoring. They talked about the policies, tactics, and systems they have put into place across schools and in communities to ensure the enabling conditions that Towns noted are at work. They also discussed the barriers they had to overcome and the course corrections they have had to make to ensure educators and tutors were coordinated and students were where they needed to be at the right time to receive the best dosage of tutoring. Manson shared that the state of Louisiana enacted the “Accelerate: High-Dosage Tutoring Initiative,” which funds targeted, in-school tutoring, and explained how the state Department of Education is helping districts in urban, suburban, and rural communities implement this initiative:   

Louisiana is unique because we have very rural areas, lots of suburban and lots of urban areas. And so I think the first reaction of a lot of those LEA leaders was, ‘What does this look like for us? We’re different. This isn’t going to work here for us.’ So we created Accelerate: High-Dosage Tutoring School System Implementation Guidance. And with this guidance document, we invite every school system to have a one-on-one meeting with us. Because everybody in Louisiana is so different. But what remained constant is the structure or the bones of the high-dosage tutoring law. So that doesn’t change, but what changes is their unique situations. So I found myself in those conversations [guiding districts in diverse communities through the steps they need to take to achieve success]. And so with this guide, we really tried to make it work for everyone, even though it’s not a one-size-fits-all approach.

If you were able to attend the session, we would love to hear your feedback! We appreciate your help in filling out the following form as we seek to learn and understand the perspectives, ideas, critiques and recommendations that better inform our key audiences.