In response to unfinished learning caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, school districts across the country have invested in evidence-based instructional models that accelerate student learning. High-dosage tutoring (HDT), which typically involves a tutor working with small groups of three or four students at least three times a week during the school day, has been shown to have positive effects on students’ learning.

The Personalized Learning Initiative—led by the University of Chicago Education Lab in collaboration with MDRC—seeks to understand how school districts can expand the benefits of high-dosage tutoring (and more affordable alternatives). It began a partnership with Fulton County Schools in Georgia to study, expand, and enhance its high-dosage tutoring program in a subset of elementary, middle, and high schools in Fulton County’s highest-need learning zones. Fulton County Schools was particularly interested in integrating HDT into sixth- through twelfth-grade math settings, as student math proficiency—measured via adaptive diagnostics tests and state math assessments—had decreased by nearly half a year of learning during the pandemic.

This blog post describes key decisions that Fulton County secondary schools made over the course of the 2022–2023 and 2023–2024 school years when setting up their HDT program at full scale, with lessons about their successes, considerations, and the challenges they faced with each approach.

When should secondary students attend tutoring sessions during the school day?

HDT programs are most successfully implemented when students have dedicated time for tutoring during the school day. However, many schools struggled to find time in students’ busy schedules, especially because tutoring took place several times a week. The Fulton County schools used different approaches to address this issue.

Scheduling Sessions During Intervention Periods and Electives: Particularly during the first year of implementation, schools offered HDT during students’ electives (like art, chorus, or theater) or their intervention periods. (Intervention periods—sometimes called “response to intervention,” “enrichment,” or “what I need” periods—are blocks of time set aside for every student to receive remediation, enrichment, or acceleration in a specific content area.) Tutors pulled eligible students from their intervention or elective periods and worked with them in small groups in the classroom or in another allocated space. Pulling students from these periods meant that they didn’t miss their regular classes, also known as Tier 1 instruction. Although this approach was convenient, the experience was not always ideal. Some students were disappointed to miss their electives. A few schools reported that older students felt that leaving class for tutoring was stigmatizing and, in some cases, they refused to leave or they skipped both their class and their tutoring session.

Scheduling Sessions During Tier 1 Instruction: During the second year of implementation, several schools integrated tutoring into academically focused periods, including students’ math class or a math support period that was offered to students who were performing below grade level. In this approach, all students in the classroom received tutoring from a tutor or small-group instruction from their math teacher. Tutors were present every other day, which enabled teachers to present new material on nontutoring days and use the tutors to support concept mastery. This approach was effective for Fulton County secondary schools because most of their students were performing below grade level in math. It may not be an effective solution for classrooms with academically diverse students.

Should tutors use a push-in or pull-out tutoring approach?

Students benefit most from tutoring that is delivered in small groups. In some schools, tutors convened their small groups in students’ original classrooms (called “push-in tutoring”), while in others, tutors used alternative learning spaces (“pull-out tutoring”).

Push-In Tutoring: This approach was typically chosen when every student in a classroom would receive tutoring, either during Tier 1 instruction or during an intervention period where students were receiving a supplementary service or doing individual work. Schools favored setups where tutors could branch off into their own sections of the classroom and use materials like individual whiteboards to help engage students. The push-in approach created opportunities to use teachers’ time creatively. In one school, a teacher left her classroom—while her students worked with their tutors—to support newer teachers in other classrooms. Other schools chose to have the teacher support a small group of students alongside the tutors.

Pull-Out Tutoring: When only a subset of students in a classroom would receive tutoring, schools typically chose to have those students meet their tutors in a different location. (Since secondary school students are already comfortable moving independently from one class to another, to minimize transition time, tutors did not physically collect students from their classrooms.) Some schools—particularly the ones offering tutoring sessions on a large scale—struggled to find additional space for tutoring; some groups met in busy hallways and occasionally multiple tutoring groups were crowded into one classroom. School leaders felt that students were better able to concentrate and engage in tutoring when quiet spaces (such as empty classrooms, computer rooms, hallway alcoves, or unoccupied lunchrooms) were available.

How can schools collaborate with tutors and tutoring vendors to maximize their investment?

HDT programs are a resource-intensive investment. Like many districts and schools across the nation, Fulton County secondary schools relied on external tutoring vendors with an existing workforce. School leaders aimed to integrate tutors into their school communities to best support their staff and students, build tutors’ relationships and skills, and serve as many students as possible.

Tutor Training and Ongoing Collaboration with Teachers: During the 2023–2024 school year, after changes to a tutoring model left some tutors struggling to deliver sessions as designed, school administrators and vendors recognized that tutors and teachers needed additional training on the tutoring model and curriculum. They led a training session that helped tutors and teachers collaborate more effectively and develop a better understanding of the tutoring model. The training was considered so valuable that these schools integrated similar training sessions for participating teachers and tutors—and the administrators who oversaw tutoring—into their planned start-up activities for the following (2024–2025) school year. Schools also benefited from scheduling intentional planning time for teachers and tutors throughout the school year so they could align tutoring activities with subject and grade-level pacing calendars. This tactic meant that tutors could work with students on the topics they were studying during Tier 1 instruction while providing remediation on the more basic skills students were lacking that affected their ability to engage with their current curriculum (like fractions and algebraic equations). Additional training and collaboration time is a cost that schools must consider when budgeting, but school administrators who oversaw the tutoring programs reported that they found this investment to be worthwhile.

Intentional Scheduling: Vendors often require that tutors be contracted for a minimum number of consecutive hours per day. Scheduling tutoring sessions back-to-back, rather than having large gaps of time between sessions, helps capitalize on tutors’ time and retain them by giving them a full work schedule. Some Fulton County schools staggered their intervention blocks or math classes across the school day rather than holding them during the same period, as shown in Scheduling Example A. Two Fulton County schools—a high school and a nearby feeder middle school—partnered to hire 16 tutors, as shown in Scheduling Example B. The tutors worked at each school on alternate days, encouraging vendor and tutor retention as tutors’ weekly hours were filled immediately. Moreover, school leaders felt that working at both schools helped tutors form strong relationships with students since they were truly embedded in the community. Because school schedules are extremely complex and often inflexible after the school year begins, school leaders found that the most successful way to maximize tutors’ time was to adjust schools’ master schedules before the start of the school year to allow for back-to-back tutoring sessions.

Conclusion

Given HDT’s proven success in helping students learn, it is no surprise that districts across the country are integrating it into their educational programming. However, there are several issues to consider when designing HDT programs. While there is no one-size-fits-all approach to a school’s HDT integration strategy, there is a lot to be learned from schools and districts that have already begun the work of bringing these programs to full scale.