Everyone Is Looking to Tutoring Right Now. But How Do We Make It Work?
In seeking to answer the devastating effects of the pandemic, schools have turned to tutoring. The U.S. Department of Education, for instance, has launched the National Partnership for Student Success, recruiting 250,000 new tutors and mentors, and reports that 56 percent of public schools are using “high-dosage” tutoring to combat learning loss. But “tutoring” is no one thing. It can be in person or virtual, one-on-one or in small groups, and work better or worse. To help better understand how tutoring works and how to maximize the chance it’ll deliver, I sat down with Chuck Cohn, the founder and CEO of Varsity Tutors—the nation’s largest online tutoring platform. Varsity Tutors has been providing tutoring for 15 years and today hosts more than 40,000 tutors. We discussed Varsity Tutors, what they’ve learned over time, and what lessons their experiences might offer for current efforts.
Chuck: Varsity Tutors is a platform for online tutoring and live instruction. We offer 1-on-1 instruction and small-group sessions, as well as adaptive self-study programs, among other learning options. We’ve served students and families for the last 15 years—spanning K-8, high school, college and graduate school, and adult and professional learners. Our platform identifies a student’s academic needs and then matches students to the right expert. Our matching algorithm considers over 100 attributes, including the student’s subject requirements, schedule, learning needs, and even personal interests or career aspirations, so the match of student and tutor is strong and more likely to improve learning outcomes. So, for example, we will match an introverted student who doesn’t naturally participate and volunteer ideas with a tutor known for having an encouraging and patient approach, while a student in need of accountability and discipline will find a tutor who can give them exactly that.
Chuck: Varsity Tutors was born out of my own experiences with tutoring. When I was in college at Washington University in St. Louis, I was taking a calculus course and couldn’t comprehend most of the material. To make matters worse, I couldn’t find the help I needed before the final exam. The night before the final exam, two friends who were academically gifted and had great communication skills graciously tutored me to a passing grade. I realized other students in the local community could also benefit from access to high-quality tutors like my friends. So, I borrowed $1,000 from my parents, launched a three-page website to find students, and created a comprehensive interview and vetting process for identifying similarly gifted subject-matter expert tutors. Very quickly, it became apparent how labor and data-intensive tutoring was, and I started investing in an underlying technology infrastructure to scale high-quality tutoring and make it available to more students.
Chuck: For families, we’ve launched a membership model, in which customers pay a monthly access fee for 1:1 tutoring, small-group classes, live-streamed classes, self-study, and more starting at around $200/month. We know that learning requires consistent engagement, good data, and multiple modalities for different moments. This model enables regular and recurring access to tutors so students get the right supports at the right time.
Chuck: We’ve learned that the same elements that make in-person tutoring effective apply online—consistent and recurring, face-to-face, and connected to the classroom. Of course, we’re all used to FaceTime and Zoom now, but when we first started our Live Learning Platform in 2013, we were one of the first companies in the world to leverage WebRTC technology—which was revolutionary by allowing video communication to work from a web browser or mobile application.
Chuck: We measure success in several ways: families’ customer satisfaction, students’ pre-and post-tutoring command of skills based on their grades or standardized score increases, as well as leveraging our proprietary adaptive diagnostic tests to evaluate progress and outcomes. In a recent analysis, we reviewed pre- and post-assessment data for 14,800 students: 91 percent of students mastered the skills they were struggling with in pretutoring. Eighty-six percent of students in grades 1-8, who were classified as behind grade level in math skills, reached grade-level benchmark mastery in math. Likewise, 84 percent reached ELA mastery by the end of their tutoring. UC Irvine has also launched several randomized control trials measuring the efficacy for K-12 students across our platform. We’re excited to share those results next year. We are also working with Learn Platform and our district partners to measure the impact of their tutoring initiatives over the course of the coming school year.
Chuck: Our adaptive, diagnostic assessments take about 20 minutes to complete and give a tutor a clear, detailed report on what a student already knows and where they are struggling. This pinpoints the exact skills the student needs to work on and in what order, helping tutors provide personalized support from the very first session. For example, in the 4th grade, students learn numbers’ factors. Often, when a 5th grader struggles with adding and subtracting mixed numbers or a 9th grader is having trouble with algebraic equations, it’s because they never mastered how to break a number into its factors. In cases like this, all the time in the world spent studying 9th grade algebra concepts might not address this challenge. But if the student gets the attention, repetition, and personalized instruction they need to really solidify factors, they can be ready to build several years’ worth of math mastery on that foundation.
Chuck: During the pandemic, the shift to online triggered an enduring shift in consumer preferences. Parents and school district leaders embraced online learning as a critical component of education. It also created a need for new solutions. In August 2021, when we saw how behind students across the country were falling during the first year of the pandemic, we began collaborating with districts to build a platform that would allow them to offer high-quality tutoring and small-group instruction at a districtwide scale for their students.
Chuck: We’ve partnered with about 200 school districts, and that number is growing quickly. This fall, we launched two new districtwide offerings: “On-Demand,” which allows students to chat with their tutor around the clock as needed, and “Teacher Assigned,” which allows any teacher in a school district to assign private one-on-one or small-group tutoring to any student in their class that needs additional, focused help with the same tutor on a recurring basis. These programs bring together multiple types of learning and allow teachers to decide which students receive additional support.
Chuck: Varsity Tutors facilitates, literally, millions of one-on-one and small-group tutoring hours each year in the United States. Despite that scale, we are humbled by the complexity of challenges that have been either created or exacerbated by the pandemic. We’re encouraging districts to embrace teacher-driven models that provide every student in the classroom access to learning solutions and empower teachers to assign tutoring hours to students individually. This doesn’t only benefit students, but it supports teachers in a moment when burnout is at an all-time high. My advice is: Make sure your tutoring effort is teacher-led. Consistent, live, face-to-face interactions between tutors and students matter. Certainly, some students may just need on-demand support to troubleshoot a concept they are stuck on, but for most kids, that ongoing relationship with a trusted instructor can make all the difference.
3 Guiding Principles for High-Quality Virtual Learning
A lot of folks are justifiably down on virtual learning after the half-baked, mic-muted, camera-off mess that so often passed for remote learning. After that experience, I’ve had a lot of parents, policymakers, and educators ask whether the past few years should disabuse us of our enthusiasm for the promise of technology in K-12. This is a topic I consider at some length in my forthcoming book The Great School Rethink (out from Harvard Ed Press next spring), which is how I wound up in an extended exchange about all this with the always-provocative Evo Popoff, a VP of Whiteboard Advisors. Evo, formerly the chief innovation officer for the New Jersey education department and a VP at EdisonLearning, retains an upbeat take on virtual learning that I thought well worth sharing. Here’s what he had to say.
Many of us might equate virtual learning to the remote learning that occurred during the COVID-19 school closures—much of which was haphazard and unsatisfactory. Stories abound of students who wilted when their education shifted to Zoom and they were largely cut off from others, as even once-stellar pupils—many of whom began facing mental health challenges—stopped turning in work or attending class. All of this might lead us to adopt a simplistic binary that all virtual learning is bad and in-person learning is good. But reality is far more nuanced because while many students wilted, others have thrived.
In “A Human-Centered Vision for Quality Virtual Learning,” commissioned by Edmentum, we drew on research and interviews with dozens of experts and practitioners, including educators and school and district leaders, to try to better understand what separates high-quality virtual programs from unsatisfactory experiences. We heard a very different story of what virtual learning could be and do—for instance, connecting students to resources that otherwise might not be available at their schools or providing additional support in vital areas like English/language arts.
In the report, we captured this potential in a “day in the life” of a hypothetical 8th grader, Maya, who seamlessly navigates a world that is both virtual and in person to pursue learning in a way that makes sense for her—bouncing from a one-on-one prealgebra tutoring session to an online college course in environmental engineering to an in-person writing workshop.
But while Maya is hypothetical, her experience isn’t. Everything we write about in her journey is taken from what school leaders told us. It represents a future where learning is not tied to one particular time or place. As D’Andre Weaver, the chief digital equity officer of Digital Promise, said to us: “The future of learning is hybrid and ubiquitous. Kids can learn anytime and everywhere.”
So, if high-quality virtual learning is something distinct from the emergency remote learning of the pandemic, what actually is it? Our report presents three key themes that are central to a vision for top-quality virtual learning. (I should note that these are not meant to be an exhaustive list of best practices but a way to level-set this view of education.)
First, high-quality virtual learning is about people, not technology. Too often, we imagine virtual learning as a student sitting alone for hours at a time in front of a computer screen, isolated. While independent work has a role in virtual learning, learning experiences must be designed with human relationships at the center if all students are to succeed. The flexibility of virtual models and the technologies they use create potential opportunities for core relationships to thrive—and help make virtual learning “part of the DNA of who we are as educators and an education system,” in the words of Friendship Public Charter Schools chief of staff Ken Cherry.
What might this look like? At Odyssey Junior and Senior Charter High School in Palm Bay, Fla., every virtual student receives a “champion” who facilitates relationship-building between students and their online instructures. The Akron school district, in Ohio, which established a new online school for the 2021-22 school year, paired its virtual students with mentors who help the students navigate online platforms, stay engaged, and achieve their goals. This allowed their teachers to focus more on teaching, knowing that there was another adult whose full-time job was monitoring students’ educational progress and personal journeys.
Second, good instruction is good instruction—regardless of modality. As Zach Blattner, the senior director of teacher professional education at the Relay Graduate School of Education, observed, “At the end of it all, it just gets back to good teaching. You have to plan; you can’t just wing it.” At the same time, different modalities can require different approaches to instruction. Not surprisingly, planning lessons, customizing curricula, classroom management, and other teacher tasks can look or feel different in a virtual environment. In virtual settings, Blattner said, “Educators must be even more intentional about their norms and routines to not waste class time with what can be the distractions and disruptions of technology.” Teachers might need access to specialists who can help them adjust virtual delivery to accommodate students with different learning abilities.
Finally, a culture focused on the success of all students is nonnegotiable. Based on interviews with virtual program operators and other experts in the field, the secret to their successes lies in their focus on people and creating a culture that encompasses both in-person and virtual experiences. Districts that are growing their virtual learning programs need to adapt their systems and practices to build a culture focused on success for every student. This can be as simple as relying on one learning-management system to limit switching between platforms or offering resources to families in multiple languages, or it can be as complicated as ensuring home access to broadband internet and devices for all students. It includes embracing the more flexible approach to scheduling that virtual programming offers and rethinking roles, expanding the view of the teaching team to include outside teachers, experts, and support staff. And it can entail clearly identifying the person in the district who is responsible for overseeing virtual programs and ensuring their success.
For those of your readers with whom this resonates, we suggest referencing the “Putting It All Together” page of the report, where we present key practical points for virtual learning stakeholders to consider. For instance, we suggest district leaders who are developing a virtual program or school ask themselves questions such as “How are we measuring success? Are there measures of success or engagement that are unique to the virtual environment?” And, for families who want to enroll their child in a virtual learning experience, we suggest asking questions like “Who is the adult responsible for caring about my student and identifying what they need to succeed?”
Districts are currently facing unprecedented challenges, from teacher shortages to helping students recover from the devastating effects of the pandemic. Unless we change our way of thinking about virtual learning, it’s possible we might miss out on key ways to help solve these challenges. Our hope in this report is to begin a more nuanced discussion around virtual learning, beyond the simplistic binary that virtual instruction is bad and in-person is good. The goal is to help capture those characteristics of high-quality virtual learning to help equip school leaders, parents, policymakers, and others to more thoughtfully approach what successful virtual learning can and should entail.
