Tutoring and mentoring promotes active learning
Dionissi Aliprantis
What do you think is the issue or the problem that tutoring and mentoring can help solve?
Matthew Kraft
I think educators face a considerable challenge in showing up every day, in front of a group of 20, upwards of 30, even 35 students in a single class. And one only has to have one or two kids to know that wrangling more than one is a major challenge. So I think the intuition behind tutoring is very simple: When you create a context for adults to work one-on-one or in small groups with kids, it reduces the dimensionality of the problem. It also, I think, creates an opportunity to form closer personal connections because you can actually get to know someone.
And so tutoring is a vehicle that’s really just built on the foundation of what is a long history of mentorship in the community, of one-on-one private tutors, throughout times of antiquity, working with students. So the idea is that, well, rather than trying to potentially teach to the middle of the distribution of skills in a class, or to differentiate in a way that addresses students’ learning needs where they are, can we come up with more of a spectrum of instruction within public schools where we continue to deliver the group instruction that is the hallmark of how we’ve designed education today but we also move the needle on that distribution towards the more personalized end as well, so that it complements what we can achieve in group instruction?
What one does in a small group—two-to-one, three-to-one, or even one-on-one—setting is a very different type of pedagogy. It is about asking students questions. The amount of student talk, the teacher talk can completely flip. And it also gives a tremendous amount of at-bats for the student. They can try something, immediate feedback, try it again, immediate feedback. And so, I think that there’s a combination of both major change and pivot in the pedagogical exchange between students and teachers. And this is more of a hypothesis for which there isn’t as strong evidence yet—that tutoring is about the relationship between the tutor and the student. And when that context allows for a caring connection between the two, it can help to motivate the student to want to engage, to be able to live up to the hope and expectations of their tutor, to be able to really have that “aha! light-bulb moment,” and to see the instant gratification of their tutor, to be like, “we got this, we’re making progress.”
And so I think there’s a unique combination of both much more individualized pedagogy and that personal connection that helps to motivate and get those students who may, in a larger class setting, fade into the background.
There is strong evidence on the effectiveness of tutoring
Matthew Kraft
So, one of the stylized facts in education research is that it’s incredibly hard to move the needle on things like student performance on standardized tests. And, of course, there’s been really exciting studies that have found that this policy, or that intervention, or that program really was impressive. But what happens, more often than not, is we try that approach again, and it underwhelms the next time. Or another context, it doesn’t quite deliver the same bang for the buck.
And so, one of the things that we do in research is we try to ask, “What is the weight of the evidence across the full body of research that’s been conducted?” And when we do that in studies, like meta-analyses, we start to see the forest for the trees and what rises to the top in terms of consistently delivering and supporting student learning. And in my decade plus of research, the evidence from meta-analyses of rigorous randomized controlled trial evaluations of tutoring stand out as one of the most compelling bodies of evidence we have on an education intervention to improve student achievement.
How to scale tutoring and mentoring across public schools
Dionissi Aliprantis
You’re thinking a lot about public education. But you have this article with Grace Falk entitled, “A Blueprint for Scaling, Tutoring, and Mentoring Across Public Schools.” I’d really like to talk about that article
In the article, you talked about changing how people even conceive of tutoring in schools, that in a lot of cases, people will think of tutoring as this add-on, temporary intervention—somebody needs help with this specific thing.
And you’re thinking about this as this long-term expansion in public schools. It would probably take place over a long period of time. I’m wondering if you could describe that bigger picture and how you are thinking in this article—at least, what you would think would be an ideal way that this would happen.
Matthew Kraft
So, tutoring is something that all of us have heard of, many of us may have experienced in some form. And, more often than not, we think about it as this afterschool program that is just childcare, and there’s some college students who are helping out, and they may help us get our homework done. And that’s kind of the tutoring that we have in our mind’s eye. And that has a role in a place. But if we’re talking about tutoring as a tool to accelerate learning, I think we need to really reframe it as something that we integrate into the school day as another approach to this spectrum of instruction that we deliver inside of public schools.
And that’s important because this current moment isn’t the first time that our country has embarked on an ambitious effort to scale tutoring nationally. We can look back to the efforts under President Clinton to build America Reads through this huge volunteer army of community members who would go into schools and help students develop their literacy skills. And then we can also look at the efforts under No Child Left Behind to fund supplemental educational services that were largely dollars that families could use to contract with private tutoring companies that schools would help to facilitate.
And those happened after school, outside of the school day. For various reasons, neither of those two initiatives really were sustained or showed much evidence of moving the needle for students. And part of what I think the pivot here around tutoring that I’m hoping we can spark during this post-pandemic moment is that, it’s not seen as this add-on, it’s not seen as this and-by-the-goodwill-of-the-community-through-volunteers. It’s just part of the infrastructure that we are going to integrate into schools. And I think the analogy that’s helpful is to remind ourselves that back in the 1960s, kindergarten was not a regular feature of our public school system. We did not do K–12. We did 1–12.
And I think we need to pivot to a whole-school commitment to thinking about tutoring as just part of what we do and what we deliver. When tutoring is for just a small subset of students in a school, there’s less motivation to fundamentally change the architecture of the school day. You think, “oh well, we’ve got a handful of kids, let’s pull them out of this class,” or “let’s keep them after that class.”
